


Looming Gaia: Ocean Returns to the Sea

by TheGreys (alienjpeg)



Series: Looming Gaia [20]
Category: Looming Gaia
Genre: Abuse, Adventure, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cecaelias, Drug Use, F/M, Fantasy, Human/Monster Romance, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Magic, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 23:00:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 38,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20433881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienjpeg/pseuds/TheGreys
Summary: When a woman is captured by a strange cecaelian prince, they soon realize they share the same goals. An unbreakable promise is made, and these unlikely allies set out on their quest to escape Aquaria.





	1. Conflict on the Cliffside

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the Looming Gaia series, but it can be read and understood on its own. However, it's recommended that you at least read Chains of Melody first to get a better idea of what's going on.
> 
> Visit the Looming Gaia blog for lore, discussions, concept art, and more: https://loominggaia.tumblr.com/post/175087795478/looming-gaia-masterpost
> 
> As always, heed the tags for content warnings.
> 
> And for the record...This story was drafted almost 10 years before Guillermo Del Toro's "Shape of Water. ;)

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##  **[CHAPTER 1: CONFLICT ON THE CLIFFSIDE]**

Sunlight blinded the cecaelia. The clear daytime sky was just as harsh and irritating as sand in their eyes. So he emerged from the deep, dark waters only in the late hours or when it rained, the days when heavy clouds smothered out the sun.

He emerged again this evening under the starry sky, its red sunset fading to violet high above. He was a cecaelia like any other; an intelligent creature crafted by the loving hands of Gaia for his life at sea.

For such a life he was blessed with smooth, green skin to conceal him in the kelp forests. Rather than legs, his waist split into eight powerful tentacles to propel him through the water.

His nightvision allowed him perfect sight in the murky depths, but he cursed it, for in daylight he saw only a wash of blurry colors. Islanders slept during the night, so how was he to observe them?

Gaia never considered that, he supposed. As his wise, old ancestors said, the cecaelia and the humans were never meant to cross paths. The human world of land—Terria—and the cecaelian world of water—Aquaria—were separate worlds indeed.

This cecaelia struggled to accept that. Ever since he discovered an Islander’s corpse floating on the waves so many, many years ago, he found himself hopelessly fascinated. Upon the body he found the hide of a hairy Terrian beast, a long spear of bone, and so many odd tools and supplies.

It was the closest he’d ever been to a Terrian, having known only his own kind and their fish-like sirene neighbors in the past. His mother and father warned the cecaelia to stay away from the Islanders. Their word was law, quite literally, as they ruled over the whole Tekeetian clan.

This cecaelia had never disobeyed their wishes. But now they were long dead, his brother’s gelatinous bulk spreading across both of their thrones, and he did not respect his brother as he once respected his parents.

Every night, this cecaelia crept to his secret place on the pebbly shore to watch the Islanders on the cliffside high above.

He could see the topmost points of their conical houses, a forest of swaying conifers, rising smoke, and the occasional human wandering near the edge. If he listened closely, he could hear their music and chatter.

And if he was lucky, humans would wander down to the shore late at night. The cecaelia flattened himself against the rocks or slipped back into the water, but they never noticed him no matter how clumsy he was.

Humans had very poor vision in the dark. That much was obvious. Their eyes seemed as helpless in the dark as the cecaelia’s was in the light.

With fiery torches they illuminated a short distance around themselves while they collected driftwood, pressed their bodies together under the moonlight, or simply took a stroll around the quiet beach to clear their busy heads. They liked to feed a big fire here and chat around it. Sometimes they danced and sang as if the popping flames gave them power.

But not all was peaceful on the island. This cecaelia had once witnessed a murder. Two men argued at the cliffside after dark, then one pushed the other over the edge and took off running. His victim flailed helplessly before his body crashed on the rocks below.

This cecaelia rushed to the scene, but it was too late. He found only the twisted corpse and all its fascinating tools. He’d returned to this spot every night since, hoping that he might speak to a live human one day.

He hadn’t the courage to approach them in their own domain. “They’ll kill you before you ever got a word out,” his mother told him sharply. “They have lived in the dark ages of stone and bone for generations with no signs of advancing. They are dangerous, yet vulnerable in their ignorance, so we must never disturb their world—for our sake _and_ theirs.”

His mother was so very old and just as wise. This cecaelia had always trusted her words, no matter how much he longed to know Terria. So he made himself scarce to the Islanders, simply hoping that perhaps another would slip over the cliffside someday and survive.

Perhaps it was not his place to meddle with Terria. But if a human found their way into Aquaria on their own…well, then they were in _his_ jurisdiction, he reasoned.

He had so many questions to ask them. The questions danced on his long, pointed tongue, eager to burst out the moment a human was in his webbed clutches. This cecaelia was obsessed and hopelessly so. He had the awareness, at least, to keep it to himself, for he knew his clan would mock him and his brother would worry.

His brother had enough to worry about, sitting on his throne meant for two. This cecaelia was supposed to take the seat beside him, but things had gone horribly wrong, and this cecaelia had become unfit to care for anyone—much less his entire clan.

The midnight hour was approaching. This cecaelia left his beloved place on the shore with equal parts reluctance and eagerness. His webbed fingers twitched, his two hearts raced, his tentacles began to contort into ugly shapes…

This was only the earliest phase of his sickness, a faint whisper of the raging storm to come if he did not report to his brother immediately.

Throwing one last glance at the sleepy village above, the cecaelia slithered back into the sea.

*

The ancient globeholder had been anchored to this spot for thousands of years. Its crab-like chassis was not topped with a shell, but a massive bubble, transparent and pulsing gently with bioluminescence.

Where one would expect crab’s pincers, the creature had two very long tentacles that wrapped tightly around a rock on the sea floor. Plants and barnacles had accepted these tentacles as part of the landscape, for they hadn’t moved in so many lifetimes.

The globeholder was one with the seafloor now. It was the palace the royal cecaelia family called home for all its life. The creature was already massive and growing still, so long as servants kept it fed.

In its globe of air, a modest castle stood. The castle’s white shellrock walls were adorned with intricate mosaics of colorful shells. The mosaics could overwhelm the eye at first glance, appeared as a violent splash of colors to the foreign eye.

But the Tekeetians knew these motifs well. They depicted the clan’s victories and foibles, told of the tribes they conquered, their times of famine, their times of plenty. The clan had grown from its humble beginnings to an advanced civilization, perhaps the most advanced in the Northern Sea.

The globeholder sat high on its rock, looming over the cavernous dwellings on the seafloor below. This Aquarian city of Tekee had a chaotic kind of elegance. It was easy to get lost in the maze of organic structures if one didn’t know the pathways by heart.

These pathways were carved deep into the heart of the troubled, sickly cecaelia, for he regretfully had known nowhere else. For as long as he was plagued, he depended on his brother’s medicine to keep him stable. He was itching terribly by the time he reached the globeholder, impatiently tugging at its jaws.

So slowly did they part, and so quickly did the desperate cecaelia squeeze through with a gush of water into the dark airlock of its mouth. The globeholder flushed the water out through its vents and then relaxed the sphincter of its throat. Through here the cecaelia slithered up into its globe.

Moving straight from the ocean’s tight embrace to the weightless air was disorienting. The sickly cecaelia had eight tentacles to balance himself, yet he still faltered. Swaying, flailing, his long torso crashed on the slimy grass below.

Around him was the royal courtyard, lush and colorful with foliage. The humidity within the globe sustained the plants, and perhaps a little magic helped them along too.

The cecaelia pushed himself upright once more and followed the smooth stone path to the castle. His black claws raked furiously over his arms, his torso, face, anywhere he could reach, for his flesh burned as if a thousand poisonous urchins had pierced him at once.

His three stomachs rolled like the waves high above. Just the thought of eating made the waves rage harder, threatening to spill half-digested kelp at the base of his brother’s thrones.

He made it to the castle’s throne room, a white dome-like interior, its walls peppered with blue sea glass. The glass glimmered as it reflected the pulsing light of the globeholder’s globe outside, creeping through the many great, circular windows.

Surrounding the thrones were several guards. Cecaelian like himself and the rest of the clan, most surely related to him in some way, others kidnapped or absorbed from enemy villages.

They were clad in scaled armor, armed with spears and magical staffs. Behind their chitin helms, their eyes regarded the sickly cecaelia with equal parts pity and contempt as he slithered up to his brother.

The thrones were completely lost under his brother’s mighty form, spilling shapelessly over them like slime. His body gleamed with abalone jewelry and a crown of pearled spires sat atop his head. He folded his fingers over his rotund belly, looking down his nose at his brother shaking before him.

“Brother,” said the sickly cecaelia, all a quivering mess of reaching hands and grasping fingers, “I need my medicine now! Now, please, _now_!” He clutched the beard of minor tentacles trailing from his brother’s chin, tugged at them with urgency. “Why do you say nothing? Don’t be cruel to me! Please, hurry!”

After what felt like a silent eternity, Brother gently pushed the sickly one away with a gurgling sigh. “You’re late for your dose,” began Brother. “You’re so terribly, terribly irresponsible, Sick One. If only you cared for yourself as I do.”

The sickly one hissed through his pointed teeth, “Just give it to me! Don’t be cruel!”

His portly brother let out a calm chuckle, shaking his head once more. He swept his hand forth, addressed the guards and servants around him when he said, “Look upon him, my dear brethren, and remind yourselves why I occupy the twin thrones alone. This one isn’t fit to care for himself, much less our clan…”

“I need my medicine! Now, give it now!” Sick One growled. He lost all patience and lunged, clutching his brother’s beard once again. His scrawny body lie arched over the rotund form, tentacles grasping and wrapping and contorting like snakes.

The clan king’s face changed then, from flippancy to annoyance. With his own tentacles, he disentangled his brother and tossed him to the stone floor.

The guards clutched their weapons tighter, turning to their king for some kind of order. The king simply waved them down and said calmly, “Please, stand down. My brother is only a troubled thing to be pitied.” With that, he addressed a particular guard to his right. “Brite Keeper, fetch his greenbrite.”

Scrawny and green of complexion, Brite Keeper could be mistaken for Sick One at a glance. But unlike the clan king, Brite Keeper was only his half-brother, born from another female between the queen’s fertile times. He was also a century or two younger, though one could seldom tell a cecaelia’s age by looks alone.

Sick One waited impatiently. His teeth chattered with each violent convulsion. Brite Keeper slithered away down a corridor, off to fetch the medicine from the garden. The same garden Sick One once tried to break into, only to be apprehended by guards and banished from the very home he grew up in.

Now he could enter the globeholder only three times a day for each dose of his medicine, and then he was expected to leave. Where he went, his brother cared not, as long as he wasn’t meddling with the Islanders and bringing more troubles upon them.

Brite Keeper returned with a small parcel wrapped in kelp. It dangled on the end of a string which he held far from his body, as if it were some terrible, toxic poison.

To the sickly one, this poison was life itself. He quickly snatched it and scrambled away without a word, for he was busy stuffing his mouth with the parcel, kelp and all.

“Be well, My Brother,” the clan king told him, and it was the last thing he heard before he disappeared into the globeholder’s airlock.

*

The sickly cecaelia swam back to the cave he called “home”, though it never felt much like one for all the decades he’d spent here. His true home lie inside the castle, inside the globeholder, inside Tekee.

This was simply an empty cave far on the outskirts of the city. Its ceiling jutted high above the surface of the water, all crusted with barnacles and slimy with bioluminescent fungus.

From the surface, this cave simply looked like a barren rock peeking through the water. Only Sick One knew it was hollow, that it teemed with life inside, that its obscure entrance lie far below the waves.

His nerves began to calm just as he squeezed through the entryway. The greenbrite was metabolizing in the first of his stomachs.

In just minutes he would lose himself and the world completely, so the cecaelia hurried upwards to the surface. He crawled onto the slimy shore inside his cave, where fish bones and stray kelp lie carelessly strewn about. He hadn’t cleaned in some time. It wasn’t like he ever had company, he reasoned.

It was best to be alone, for when the greenbrite took him, his mind and body detached completely and left him vulnerable. Sick One rested on the rocky shore, closed his eyes and let the medicine soothe his pain.

His blood coursed like pleasant warmth through his veins. His bones seemed to liquefy. The rocks below drifted away as if caught in the tide, and soon the cecaelia was drifting away too.

He floated on the waves of dreams and mystery for some time. As if asleep, as if awake. And when the greenbrite returned his mind to his body, the sickly one felt empty and miserable once again.

It was all a fight upstream from here until his next dose, which he couldn’t collect until the sun’s first rays spilled over the surface.

In the meantime, the cecaelia had to occupy his troubled head. He swept the mess of bones and plants away with his tentacles, flinging it all into the water where it would surely wash in again with the next tide.

Towards the back of the cave rested a heavy old chest, some relic he found half-buried in the seafloor ages ago. It was made of wood and metal, its boards splintered with years of rot.

It was a treasure from Terria, and inside were more Terrian treasures the sickly one collected over the years. He liked to open the chest and look at them every day. They sparked his imagination as he pondered their purposes, daydreamed about Terria’s many unknowns.

Meanwhile, his clanmates spent their time in the lively heart of Tekee, dancing and sporting, hunting and gathering, living and loving their lives. This wayward prince was no one to them but a vagrant, only in their minds when he was in their sights.

He could only imagine they were as ashamed of him as he was ashamed of himself. He never belonged, even before he got sick, because he preferred the weightlessness of the air over the oppressive grasp of the ocean.

The cecaelia pondered his treasures until all three of his stomachs bellowed at once, reminding him that he was a solid, tangible being that couldn’t survive off dreams alone. He carefully replaced his treasures and closed the chest, then he disappeared back into the water.

Plucking kelp and eating it raw was effortless, and therefore what he preferred. But such a thing couldn’t sustain him forever. He could tell by his recent weakness, the aches in his joints, that it was time for a more substantial meal. In simpler times he worried not about such things, for his servants fed him whatever he desired. Now he was on his own.

Sick One crept around the reefs near the shore, ever cautious of humans and beasts alike. He picked mussels from the rocks and broke their shells between his pointed teeth.

It would take hundreds of mussels to sustain a cecaelia, but his father warned him that disrupting any one species too much would doom them all. So the cecaelia devoured only a fraction of them before searching for some other prey.

The sea stars were looking thin and not so abundant, so he let them be. Quick little fish evaded his grasp and spiny urchins were never worth the effort. Finally he spotted his meal darting away into a crevice. A reef eel, twice as long as the cecaelia’s arm and black as stone.

Its bright yellow eye gave it away. Sick One sank down to the crevice and reached inside. He winced when the eel sank its jagged little teeth into his arm, but he expected as much. The latent magic inside him would heal his wounded body, no matter how ravaged. Only a cecaelia’s brain was truly vulnerable.

Sick One seized the eel by the head. Its trail wriggled madly until he steadied it with his other hand, and with the help of a couple tentacles, he squeezed the creature to death.

It was a fat thing, had lived well its whole life. The cecaelia returned to his cave. He did not stop to eat until he was safely inside.

A more civilized cecaelia might flay the eel and take out its bones before eating it. But Sick One was a lonely, wretched thing with no one around to judge him, so he simply bit into its flesh and spit the bones out around him. Blood and oil trickled down his mouth, his beard of tentacles, his bony torso.

The less desirable remains of the eel were tossed in the water. They would wash into the cave again by tomorrow, piece by piece, until lice and fungus and other vermin reduced it to bones. The cave was truly filthy, but its stench was something the sickly cecaelia didn’t notice anymore.

Bugs had gotten in through some surface crevice long ago, drawn towards the rotting remains. Flies laid their eggs in fish long dead, mites swarming rotting kelp, the floor slimy with blood, oil, and fetid waste of all kinds.

Fungus spread up the entire length of the black, stony walls in webbing patterns, glowing brilliantly like stars against the night sky. Beautiful as it was, its spores were a musty-smelling irritant.

The cave was a safe place to Sick One, but it was not a desirable place. It was only somewhere to swallow a meal without fear of being swallowed himself, to store his precious treasures and sleep off his medicine.

So when his meal was through, he abandoned the cave once more to visit the only place that mattered to him anymore: Blackoak Beach.

The sun wouldn’t rise for many hours. Sick One took his usual place on the pebbly shore, pressing himself in the shadow of a boulder as dark and green as himself, all covered in loose seaweed. The breeze blew softly over him as the ocean whispered just behind. He could hear nothing else. No music, no voices from the cliffside.

The cecaelia was doubtful he’d see any activity tonight. He sank lower against the pebbles and made himself comfortable in the lapping tide. Every distant creak of the towering, swaying conifers made him twitch.

Once before, he watched a tree split in two and fall into the sea. Hairy little beasts desperately paddled their way back to shore while others floated dead on the waves. The sickly cecaelia tasted one and decided it wasn’t worth finishing.

Diligently he watched the cliffside for movement, light, any sign of life at all. He jumped when a piercing shriek tore through the breeze. His spine straightened, straining to see just a little more on the cliff. Another shriek he heard, followed by a shout from someone else.

A crowd of voices was beginning to swell. The cecaelia’s nerves jittered with excitement, though he tried to be still. He watched, unblinking, as a figure appeared at the edge of the cliff.

Female, he thought, for she was so small and delicate compared to the hulking, bearded human approaching her. She wore no more than a blanket, wrapped haphazardly around her and billowing in the wind.

The male before her was clad in nothing but his ragged beard. Strange, the cecaelia thought, for the humans always wore layers of skin and fur in the cold. Whatever was going on here, it must have been dire.

The male shouted at the female and she shouted back, shrill and furious. A dozen clothed figures appeared, surrounding her with caution. The female took another bold step towards the edge of the cliff. Those around her froze, panic swelling like the waves below.

The male reached out to her, but she did not accept his hand. He stepped forward and she stepped back, her bare heels teetering on the precipice. The cecaelia watched with bated breath. His gills flattened against his throat.

More words were exchanged between the humans. Some the cecaelia could understand, for he’d spent so long eavesdropping on them. Others he could not, especially over the hiss of the ocean. The male dared to step forward and swipe at the female.

It was a mistake, for she jumped out of his grasp right into the open throat of the ocean. From atop the cliff her tribe wailed, sobbed, reached for her, but it was much too late. Her little frame disappeared among the great boulders, driftwood spires, and foamy spray far below.

The humans had surely lost sight of her in the darkness, panicking helplessly on the cliff. The naked male and several others bolted away, probably taking the trail down to the beach to search for her. But they would never reach her before the cecaelia did, already speeding through the water.

A jumble of boulders and debris lie at the base of the cliff, likely having been part of the cliff itself at one time. The cecaelia struggled to squeeze through its openings, searching frantically for a battered corpse. It would float, he was sure, so he cautiously surfaced.

The crowd of onlookers were still panicking above him. They could not even see him in this darkness, so he slithered freely over the rocks like a slippery tangle of kelp.

He saw a dark mass float by, slopping against the rocks. The cecaelia reached out with one of his tentacles and plucked it from the water. It was only the blanket. The human mustn’t be far.

He dove back into the water. Like a fish, he darted this way and that, pushing deceptive logs of driftwood out of his path. One log felt particularly supple under his grasping tentacle.

When the foam and murk settled, he realized he was grasping the ankle of the female. She wriggled and thrashed in his grip. A stream of white bubbles burst from her mouth with a silent scream.

She was alive. But she wouldn’t be for long without oxygen, the cecaelia knew well, and her other leg was mangled on top of that. Above, the humans panicked. Towards the beach, the warm glow of torches was fast approaching. Behind, the ocean called.

The cecaelia surfaced only briefly, sucking in a gulp of briny air. He willed his magic forth, felt its tingle like sparks below the skin. Then he pulled the thrashing human to the depths with him and blew a glimmering bubble from his lips. It grew and grew as his chest sunk and sunk.

In seconds, the human found her head sealed in a transparent sphere. It was heavy yet weightless, malleable yet delicate, and like all magic, defying logic as she knew it completely.

Her panic calmed to a stunned silence, eyes rounded at the cecaelia floating before her. His expression was no different as he stared back.

The human sputtered up water into her bubble-helmet. It sank through the magical membrane, repelled like oil. She could breathe, she realized. Though that hardly meant she was safe.

A monstrous sea-devil was staring at her like a wolf to a carcass. From head to tentacle, he was almost as long as two men, his webbed fingers tipped with black claws, each tentacle wider and surely stronger than her thigh.

Uselessly she tried to swim away. She knew it was hopeless from the start, and now she was being dragged through the water by her wrist like a doll, down and down and further down into the black depths.

*

The sickly one had never attracted so much attention in his life. His clan always seemed to go out of their way to ignore him until now, as he dragged a Terrian alien through the city.

A crowd of curious onlookers followed him all the way up to the globeholder. They chattered in their language of pops and clicks—that which carried further in the ocean than the language they spoke in the air.

The human looked around at them with round eyes. Her injured leg left a stream of blood in her wake. The flesh of her calf was scraped down to the broken bone, yet in her shock she could hardly feel a thing.

She screamed as they passed through the giant maw of the globeholder. When the airlock drained, her magical bubble startled her with a loud pop. Only then did her pain sink in as she tried to stand. Quickly she collapsed with a yowl on the tongue of the behemoth, so the cecaelia lifted her into his arms and carried her through the throat.

The world beyond was unlike anything she’d ever seen. A lush garden of foreign foliage, a glittering white dome all adorned with shells, all within a glowing globe of air beneath the sea…

It was a far cry from the drab wooden huts of home. Surely she had struck her head on the rocks, had died then and there, and now the spirits were taking her to the afterlife.

Beautiful or terrifying, she could not begin to decide. It was all so overwhelming, the blood loss so great, her pain so sharp that she fainted in the cecaelia’s arms. For a moment, he was sure he’d lost her. Still he saw the gentle rise and fall of her chest, so he slithered on into the castle.

He found the clan king on his thrones, right where he always was. He hadn’t moved an inch in decades, yet Sick One feared he’d cross the room and throttle him when he saw the human in his arms. His brother’s yellow eyes rounded like pearls, lurching forward so hard that he nearly lost his balance.

Guards rushed to steady him as he pointed to the human and bellowed, “What is _that_ doing here? My Brother, explain yourself at once!”

The sickly cecaelia shrank back at his volume. Slowly, cautiously, he crept forward. “I found her in the sea,” he said hoarsely. “She couldn’t return to the island on her own. She’s badly injured, look!” Gesturing to her bloody leg, he went on, “You must help her, Brother! Please! You’re the only one who can!”

The clan king hesitated. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. Sinking back onto his thrones, he finally found his words. “Did Mother not tell us to meddle with the Islanders?” he asked.

“Yes, but—”

“Did she not warn us of the danger? Yet here you are, dragging one of them straight into the heart of our clan!” Brother’s voice rose with every word, clawed fists clenched over his belly.

He thrusted an accusatory finger at his sickly brother and continued, “Get that creature out of here at once! Leave it exactly where you found it and pray that the rest of them don’t spear you on sight!”

“But she will _die_!” argued Sick One, clutching the unconscious human tighter.

Brother queried loudly, “And what does it matter to you? Have you been frolicking on the surface again?”

Sick One opened his mouth to speak. He quickly closed it, for he knew only the truth would come out. His people were magical fae, and no fae could tell a lie.

His silence said enough. Brother’s voice boomed off the domed ceiling, “You wretched little _fool_! You can’t be trusted with anything, can you? Inciting a war with the Terrians—is that what you want?”

The sickly one took a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly to shut out the world and steady his thoughts. Perhaps he was sad and pathetic and defective in some way, but still he knew his brother well. They hatched from the very same clutch, after all.

“If I bring her back,” he began slowly, “the rest of them will see me. And if I bring her back in this condition, what impression will they have of us? Like you say, they are primitive and stupid. They won’t understand. _That’s_ why you must help her, Brother.”

The clan king fell silent for a long, heavy moment. His gaze drifted around at the guards, each one struggling to conceal their nerves. Eagerly they awaited their next order.

With a gurgling sigh, the king replied, “We could just as well bury it in the Great Trench and forget about it. But I’ve never worked my magic on a Terrian before, and I suppose no wizard worth his salt would turn down the experience. I will do what I can, if only for my own benefit.”

He raised a palm, quickly added, “Under one condition! Promise me that you will take the human back to Terria.”

“Alright.”

“Promise me!”

“I promise.”

The portly cecaelia’s eyes darkened. “Do not trifle with me, Brother,” he said lowly. “_Promise_ me.”

There was no sneaking around it. Sick One sighed, hesitated as he thought of any way to botch the promise, for he’d be hopelessly bound to whatever he was about to say next.

“I promise,” he began reluctantly, “to take this human back to Terria.”

The words left a foul aftertaste. But the clan king was satisfied, so he beckoned his brother closer and gestured to the stone platform before him. There the sickly one carefully lay the human.

She was bare and shivering, her once pink lips tinged blue. Her brown skin was smattered with darker brown spots from face to toe, her hair lying around her in a halo of wet tangles.

There wasn’t much to her. She was thin, perhaps even a bit malnourished. And when she opened her eyes, she saw a mountain of blubber and glowing yellow irises looming over her most menacingly.

She let out a shriek, startling everyone in the room. The clan king jumped, nearly slipped off his thrones. His brother threw himself forward to catch him, for if he fell on the little human, he’d surely crush her to paste.

“Brite Keeper,” barked the king, “silence it at once! I must have full concentration for the procedure.”

Always posted to his king’s right, the lackey slithered forth and slapped a tentacle over the human’s screaming mouth. She squirmed and clawed at him with her pitiful blunt nails while the king loomed over her once more. Sick One wrung his hands anxiously.

He watched as his brother—clan king, medicine master, hero of their people—worked his curative magic. He seized the human’s mangled leg in his glowing hands. At once, her blood stopped pouring and the flesh began to mend. Little by little, the terrible wound sealed itself.

Suddenly she arched her back, scream muffled under Brite Keeper’s tentacle. The sickly cecaelia cocked his head at a curious crackling sound, like the flaming torches of the Islanders.

He recoiled when he realized it was her broken bones magically shifting back into place. They too mended rapidly, the color returned to her flesh, and in just a few short minutes, all evidence of her injuries was gone.

The clan king sank back into his thrones, seemed pleased with himself as he folded his hands over his belly. Brite Keeper released the human’s face and returned to his post. She was left panting on the floor, eyes wide no longer in pain, but in disbelief of everything transpiring before her.

Addressing his brother, the clan king said, “I’ve fulfilled my promise. Now you fulfill yours. Take the human away! It is the first and last that shall ever lay eyes on Tekee, is that clear?”

“Yes. Thank you, My Brother,” the sickly one muttered, gathering the human in his arms. This time she clung to him as if he were a raft in a sea of sharks.

He descended the slope into the globeholder’s throat. It closed behind him, then its jaws opened and the airlock filled with water. The human panicked only briefly, for the cecaelia granted her another magical bubble around her head.

It allowed her to breathe, that much was clear. But little did she know, it also spared her body from collapsing under the pressure of the ocean.

Such magic protected the cecaelia naturally. Sick One knew a handful of spells, but they were mere parlor tricks compared to the power his brother wielded. Sick One thought he may have been powerful like that at one time, but it was all a blur through the years of wretched medicine effects.

At least he was capable enough to get this human home in one piece. But that was never the plan anyway. After he dragged her out of Tekee and into the open waters, after the crowd of nosey onlookers dispersed, he pulled her into the shadow of his secret cave.

Before they surfaced, he grasped the human’s shoulders and forced his face into her bubble-helmet. She jumped with a shriek, but he did not attack as she expected.

Rather, he looked into her eyes and asked, “Do you understand me?”

The human hesitated. “I—y-yes. Yes, I do!” she stammered. She was just as surprised by her answer as he was.

The cecaelia didn’t smile with his mouth, but he seemed to do so with his eyes. He continued, “Then make me promise this: that I will protect you from my brother.”

“What?” The human quirked her brows. His accent was strange, his words rather broken, but she could understand them well enough. What she didn’t understand was what he wanted from her.

“Make me promise,” he repeated slowly, “that I will protect you from my brother. Please.”

She hesitated for a long moment. Her head was so foggy, her reality so twisted, she barely knew what she was saying when she did as she was told.

“Um, promise me that you will protect me from your brother.”

The cecaelia’s grip on her shoulders loosened. He closed his eyes, let out a sigh of relief as if he was released from some burdensome curse. “Very well,” he said. “I _promise_ that I will protect you from my brother, the clan king, at any cost.”

With that, he took her wrist once more and pulled her into the cave. There was no time for questions as she found herself speeding upwards, and to her surprise, she breached the surface of the water.

At first, she thought she saw the starry sky above, until she realized it was only some kind of slime sparkling on the black stony ceiling. They were inside a great cave. Her bubble disappeared again when he dragged her onto the shore. There she sat and slowly gathered her surroundings.

Beyond rocks and reeking refuse, there wasn’t much to look at. The smell was overwhelming. The human gagged, stuffed a fistful of her wet coppery hair in front of her nose and asked, “W-who are you?”

The cecaelia towered over her on the shore. Though he wasn’t smiling, he somehow seemed pleased in her presence, his hands folded anxiously at his torso.

The clan king didn’t know about his cave. He had taken the human to Terria as he promised…just not the part of Terria his brother expected.

“I hail from the cecaelian clan of Tekee,” he told her. “My mother and father ruled the clan once, but my brother took their place. He is the one who fixed you with his spells.” He pointed to her leg, fresh and unharmed, not a hair disturbed where the flesh once gaped moments ago.

The human briefly touched her leg, then looked back at the cecaelia. “But what is your name?” she asked.

The cecaelia paused, seemed thrown off by the question. “My name?”

“Yes. My name is Solveig,” she told him, pressing a hand to her chest. “So what is yours?”

“Solveig,” the cecaelia repeated slowly, testing the alien word on his tongue. “Are all your kind called Solveig?”

She shot him a strange look. “Er, no. I’m the only Solveig. My parents gave me the name when I was born. What did your parents call you?”

“Ah, I understand! They called me Child, or sometimes Troublesome One. My brother calls me Brother, or Sick One, or Fool, or when he’s very cross with me, he calls me Pest.”

The human blinked. The moment this creature spoke her language, she hoped things might start making sense. No such luck.

“You don’t have names,” she said cautiously, “only titles?”

The cecaelia’s hands wrung faster. He feared that he’d made some kind of mistake, had offended her, yet he was already learning so much so quickly.

“I don’t know the difference,” he admitted. “There is so much I don’t know about your kind. But I have watched you for a long, long time from up there on the shore…”

He pointed vaguely at the wall, towards the island beyond. “…I’ve listened to your voices every day, made sense of your language, hoping for this very moment when I would get the chance to speak with one of you. I want to know everything. You will tell me everything, won’t you?”

Once again, the human was at a loss for words. Her jaw hung open until finally she shook her head, replied on the verge of tears, “Are you going to kill me? Because if you are, stop toying with me and just get it over with!”

Hairless brows arching, the cecaelia said, “No, of course not!” He paused. “Though I cannot speak for my brother. If he knew you were still here, I cannot say what he would do to you. He believes I’ve taken you back to your island.”

The human sniffled, wiped her tears with her filthy palms. “Is that what the promise was about? You want to protect me because he wants to kill me?

“Something like that.”

“But you don’t want me to die?”

“Of course not. Why would I, after all the trouble I went through to ensure your survival? I found a dead Terrian once, but he raised more questions than answers. You can teach me so much more!”

He turned, quickly slithering to the back of the cave. He stopped at an old, wooden chest and beckoned her over with excitement. “Look, look at this!” he called.

Warily the human padded towards him. Once, twice, she nearly slipped on the slimy stone. The chest creaked when the cecaelia opened it, and inside was a little treasure trove of discarded junk.

He handed her a knife, dull with age and exposure. It looked to be centuries old. “This came from your island,” he said, bright with enthusiasm. “I found it on the body of the first Terrian I’d ever seen. I sense no magic from it, yet its blade burns scars in my flesh! Tell me, Solveig, what is it made of?”

Turning the knife over in her hands, Solveig replied, “I think it’s just iron.” She tapped the dull blade against her palm, then dropped the tool back in the chest. “Everyone in the village gets their first knife when they come of age. I had one too, but it’s…”

She shook her head, reality sinking in. “Why do you want to know anyway? Are you taking me back to the island or not?”

The cecaelia began to answer, “Well, I—”

But she quickly turned to him, eyes sparkling with equal parts fear and anger when she added, “Because I tell you, going back there would be worse than death! If you take me back, I’ll throw myself right off the cliff again, and this time I won’t miss the rocks!”

Raising his palms before him, the cecaelia assured her, “I have no intention of taking you back. I saw you were in some kind of trouble with your kind. I watched you fall. I thought I should get to you before they did.”

“You thought right,” she mumbled, sinking back to the stony floor. She drew her knees to her chest and quivered. “Anyway, you have my thanks. It’s sick that a random sea-devil cared more for my well-being than my own family.”

“What happened between you and your people?” the cecaelia queried.

Solveig shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Quickly she changed the subject, began rifling through the chest. “It’s so damned cold in this place! I need fire. Do you know what fire is?”

“I think so. It makes light like the sunset, does it not? I’ve seen your kind carry it before.”

“Right. It makes light, but it also makes heat. I need to stay warm or I’ll freeze to death,” Solveig told him. Her voice became more harried with each word, though she felt a shred of relief when she found a flint arrowhead in the chest. “I need tinder to make the fire.”

“Tinder?”

“You know, dry straw? Leaves, grass, anything. It just has to be dry.”

The cecaelia frowned. There was nothing dry to be found in the ocean or in his cursed cave.

“You need this fire for warmth?” he clarified.

Solveig was a tangle of shivering limbs when she replied, “Yes, that’s what I said! I’m freezing to death in here! Please, hurry and bring me some wood to burn!”

The cecaelia stroked his beard of tentacles in thought. She was asking of him an impossible task. But the very nature of magic was to overcome the impossible, so he willed its power to his hands. Rapidly he rubbed them together until bright sparks crackled between his palms.

Solveig watched, entranced as he blew a gentle gust of air at the light. When he spread his hands apart, the light expanded with them. Now a golden, glowing orb hovered between them like a tiny sun, casting its light over the cave. More importantly, it casted its warmth on Solveig.

The human stepped towards the strange, arcane thing, throwing a look at the cecaelia as she did. To reassure her, he passed his hand through the orb. It phased through harmlessly, light rippling like smoke.

“I cannot give you fire. All I can offer is magic,” he said.

Solveig hovered her palm over the core of the orb. She tapped it as she might tap a flame, but unlike a flame, she felt no burn. All the way through was pleasant warmth that spread through her bones as long as its light reached her.

She was transfixed by its beauty, it’s sheer _impossibility_. “My people speak of magic,” she said. “They say it can do anything.”

“Theoretically. But will it keep you warm as fire does?”

Solveig passed her hand through the orb. “I hope so,” she said, slowly taking her seat on a nearby stone. She drew her knees up again and hugged them close.

She glanced towards the cecaelia and asked, “You’re going to keep me here forever, aren’t you?”

The cecaelia hesitated to answer. It sounded less barbaric in his head, but when spoken from her lips, he felt like a monster. Not even he wished to be in this awful cave for long.

“I just want you to survive,” he decided. It was the truth. Solveig looked around for a moment.

Then she asked, “There was a village back there, under the sea. That’s your village, isn’t it?”

“Yes. That’s Tekee,” the cecaelia told her.

“In my village,” the human began, “we tell naughty children that if they don’t behave, the seafoam will turn them into fishes and they’ll be forced to live in the ocean.” She shook her head, almost smiling. “I never believed it. But now I see it must be true. It must be magic! Could you do that? Could you turn me into a fish so that I could be free?”

Expression grim and tone equally so, the cecaelia rumbled, “There is no freedom here. Not for anyone.” The small ray of hope collapsed from Solveig’s face. He added, “If I could, I would give you everything you desired. But I’m no less trapped here than you are. And besides, I’m not half the wizard you believe if you think I could turn you into a fish.”

“Well, I can’t stay here forever!” the human exclaimed, gesturing to the dark walls around her. After a moment she quieted, said, “There is a place called Redwood Island. You can just barely see it on the horizon. Will you take me there?”

Sick One suddenly seemed pained, wrapping his arms around himself. He knew the island she spoke of. It was so far away, he couldn’t possibly get there and back before his sickness claimed him, no matter how badly he longed to.

“I cannot,” he told her.

She furrowed her brow. “Why not?”

“Because it’s impossible.”

Solveig glanced back at the orb. “I’ve already seen you do the impossible. What’s so hard about taking me to Redwood?”

The cecaelia shook his head, gently swaying the mane of minor tentacles dangling from his skull. “I shouldn’t stray far from my brother. I’m sick, you see, and he keeps my medicine for me.”

Solveig’s eyes jumped up and down over him. “You don’t look sick,” she decided.

“It isn’t that kind of sickness,” he told her, tapping his forehead. “My brother tells me the sickness is inside, in my head, and that is why I’m not fit to take the throne. He’s a master of medicine. He knows my sickness better than I do.”

The wrinkle remained carved between Solveig’s brows. She rolled his words over and over, trying to understand.

“So I’m trapped here,” she said flatly.

Sick One tipped his head, replied sullenly, “Just as I am, I’m afraid.”

A silence passed between them. After a moment, the cecaelia looked back at her with a little smile in his eyes and added, “But I will do everything I can to care for you. You’ll be safe from my brother here.”

Solveig let out a long sigh, dropping her head against her knees. “From my _family_ too, I suppose.” She nearly spat the word. “I guess I have no choice. I couldn’t go home if I wanted to.”

“Will they kill you?”

“No. Worse.”

“What will they do?”

The human crossed her legs, resting her elbows upon them. She cradled her jaw in her hand and told the cecaelia, “How about this? You tell me about magic and I’ll tell you about my people.”

The smile returned to Sick One’s eyes. “Very well,” he said, and made himself comfortable before her. The orb sparkled beside them, so bright that through his eyes, Solveig became a white blur in its glow.

He told her what he knew of magic, but admitted that there wasn’t much to tell. He could hardly call himself a “wizard”, as the spells he knew were mostly those all his clan learned as children.

Otherwise, he understood the properties of light and air better than they did, for he spent so much time on the surface. His people never bothered learning how to form magical air bubbles in the sea, but it was something the sick one idly practiced for decades.

He never bothered to study beyond that as his brother did, for he became too riddled with grief after their parents passed on.

“Their deaths were sudden,” he told her. “Our kind grows older than most, I’m told. We can live to see a millennia and a half, if we’re lucky. But our parents were not so fortunate. An enemy clan raided Tekee during a celebration. They struck us at our most vulnerable.”

He pointed to the back of his skull. “Our mother took a spear here.” Then he moved the finger to his left eye. “And our father, here. I cannot forget that sight no matter how hard I try.”

Solveig’s expression strained at the grim image. “That’s awful,” she said softly.

“Yes. My brother tried to save them,” the cecaelia went on, “but even his magic was not enough. A cecaelia’s body can survive anything, you see. But if our heads are destroyed, it’s all for nothing. The rest of us will soon follow.”

He paused. With a sheepish glance, he added, “My brother would be _furious_ if he knew I told you that.”

Solveig’s lips curled into a little smile. She turned her empty palms around, said, “What am I going to do? Stab you with that sad little knife?” She tipped her head vaguely towards the chest. “Killing you would doom me next. You can trust me.”

“Perhaps I can. Though my brother says humans tell lies. Is it true?”

Solveig hesitated. “No. We can’t lie.”

“Then he is mistaken!”

“No, he’s not. That was a lie.”

The cecaelia looked down at her, stunned. The little smile returned to her face, and before long she was giggling as she bared her teeth. He thought he’d angered her until she waved her hand and said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t tease you. Yes, we can lie. Are you saying you can’t?”

“We can’t lie,” he told her, then quickly added, “but that doesn’t mean you should trust everything we say. Cecaelia are tricky and very intelligent. I warn you to take heed of how we use our words.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if I promise not to kill you, then I must obey the promise or else my words would become untruth.” The cecaelia raised a clawed finger. “You may feel safe under such a promise. But I never promised not to _hurt_ you. I could beat you to the brink of death and my words would still be true.”

Brows arching high, Solveig queried hoarsely, “You…you wouldn’t kill me _or_ hurt me, would you?”

Sick One frowned. “Never on purpose. But these are the wicked tricks of cecaelia I’ve regretfully grown to know. This is why I have little trust in them, and why I’ve taken you to this horrid cave of all places. They cannot find me here, and so they will not find you either.”

“You ran away because you couldn’t trust your own people.”

“Yes.”

Solveig lay her head on her knees once again, tangled hair falling over her legs. “So did I. We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

“Will you tell me now what happened?” the cecaelia asked almost pleadingly.

Defeated, hopeless, seeing a short future ahead, Solveig finally obliged. “I suppose I have nothing to lose,” she said, and then she began her tale.

The cecaelia listened closely, tilting his head to expose the finned ear beneath the minor tentacles dangling from his skull. She told him of her people, who he’d always known as the Islanders. They called themselves the Blackoak Tribe, and to ensure their survival, every Blackoak woman was pressured to marry young.

“My parents introduced me to this white-haired old man,” Solveig told him bitterly. “I was thirteen years old and they expected me to marry him! They said he was a respected man, but I didn’t respect him at all. He was disgusting. I cried so hard before our wedding that I made myself sick. And I suppose he pitied me then, because he called off the wedding and told my parents I wasn’t yet a woman, carrying on the way I did. They were furious with me.”

She traced her fingertip against the stone beneath her, drawing spirals in its thin layer of slime. “They tried to marry me to him again when I was sixteen. I threw another fit and slapped his face, even fought my own mother. He said I was a ‘wild animal’ and called off the wedding for good. He wanted nothing to do with me. I thought I was free forever.”

Shaking her head, Solveig continued, “When I was a child, my parents promised to protect me. They were liars! Liars the whole time! Because at nineteen, they married me off to a horrible pig of a man. I thought if I carried on hard enough, I could ruin the wedding again. I slapped him, kicked him, and he just laughed in my face. He was as big as a mountain and just as immovable.”

“I spent seven days with him,” she went on, expression strained, “it was all I could take. I decided I would rather die than let him have his way with me even one more time. I ran to the cliffside and told him he’d better never touch me again, or else I’d jump…”

Solveig trailed off, seemed reluctant to go on. She dropped her forehead in her hand.

“I saw you do it,” said the cecaelia. “I watched you jump off the edge.”

She replied quickly, “I didn’t really want to die, but I had no choice! He didn’t believe me. If I didn’t do what I did, I’d be trapped under him again as we speak. He never cared about what I thought, what I wanted or what I said! I chose not to suffer like my mother, enslaved to some fat hog for the rest of her life. Let me live free as a child or leave me to die, I told her.”

A heavy frown burdened her face. “My people promised to protect me, and then they hurt me more than anyone. That’s why I can’t trust them. I’m so _angry_ with them! All of them! The whole time he was hurting me, no one cared at all!”

The cecaelia’s clasped hands trembled ever so slightly. “I am sorry, Solveig,” he said quietly.

She sighed, “It doesn’t matter now. I had no future either way, did I?”

“I will care for you,” Sick One repeated. “What is it that your kind needs most?”

“Food. Water. Clothes. Um…” She turned her gaze up in thought. “Just those will do for now. I’m very hungry. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

“I can fetch food for you,” the cecaelia said, perking slightly. “What do you eat?”

Solveig almost smiled. “What _don’t_ I eat? There must be plenty of fish around here.”

Nodding dutifully, the cecaelia repeated the order under his breath as he slithered towards the water. He disappeared beneath the surface. Solveig was left with the silence and the mysterious magical orb. She rose to her feet cautiously, daring to explore the rest of the cave.

There wasn’t much to see beyond what she’d seen already. She found no exits beyond the way she came, and that was a longer dive than her lungs could handle.

Outside she heard the rain begin to pour, fat droplets slapping against the stone. A distant thunderclap rumbled on the horizon. Then she heard a trickling sound from somewhere nearby.

She followed the sound to a wall and found a tiny waterfall cascading down into a pool, perhaps as deep and round as her head. Years and years of trickling water must have carved such a pool in the stone. The stream was coming from some minor fault in the ceiling, invisible through the darkness.

Solveig dipped her finger in the pool and tasted the water. It was not salty like the sea. It was fresh like the rain, so she cupped her hands and drank it in.

Before long, the cecaelia returned with a live, wriggling bass wrapped in one of his tentacles. The fish was as long as Solveig’s arm. He slithered up the shore and laid it over the flat surface of a boulder. The cecaelia never knew the concept of “cooking” until Solveig brought it up just now, but he did his best to provide.

As it turned out, his best wasn’t good enough. He willed more magic into the glowing orb, trying to heat it as hot as a flame. He hadn’t the energy, especially now as his nerves screamed for medicine. The sun would be rising soon.

“It’s alright,” said Solveig. “We eat them raw too. It just doesn’t taste the same.” The flint arrowhead in the chest still had some edge to it, so she used it to slice a long gash from one end of the fish to the other.

She poked her fingers in, searched for the liver and popped it in her mouth. She picked out her favorite organs first before slicing pieces from the fatty flesh.

The cecaelia simply stood by and watched, transfixed by her every move. Solveig suddenly felt awkward when she noticed him. Gesturing her bloody fingers to the fish, she asked, “Do you want some?”

“Oh, I…I wouldn’t want to take food from your mouth,” he said sheepishly.

But she assured him, “There’s way more than I can eat here. It’ll just rot if you don’t.”

Together, human and cecaelia shared their raw, bloody meal. Over dinner—or perhaps breakfast at this hour—they discussed many topics. Solveig spoke of her parents, how she was the youngest of all her siblings, told him that her people preferred to keep their distance from the sea.

“The legend goes,” she began, swallowing another bite, “that our ancestors once tried to sail to Redwood Island. It was said to be untouched by any man, with a bounty of resources free for the taking.”

She glanced up at the cecaelia, but she couldn’t meet his gaze for long. Suddenly she seemed reluctant, somewhat embarrassed as she went on, “Then your kind attacked our voyagers. Only one made it back alive somehow, they say because a friendly dolphin pushed him back to the island. I have my doubts about that part. Anyway, that’s why we call you _sea-devils_.”

“My kind attacked your people? When?”

Solveig shrugged. “Some time many ancestors ago. It must have been bad, because the elders have forbidden boating ever since. As a child, I was told to stay out of the sea or the devils would pull me under, never to be seen again.” She paused, almost smiled. “I suppose they were right all along.”

“It couldn’t have been the Tekeetians,” the cecaelia told her quickly. “My mother and father would never allow such a thing. They were adamant about keeping peace with the land-dwellers. We only ever warred with other aquarians for all our history.”

“So there are other sea-devil tribes?”

“_Cecaelia_,” he corrected her. “We call ourselves cecaelia. There used to be others, but now there is only Tekee.” He frowned, added quietly, “My brother quickly saw to that when he took the throne.”

“The more I learn about your brother, the less I like him.”

“Oh no, he isn’t the monster I’ve made him out to be,” Sick One assured her. “He is kind and very wise. He is just…”

The cecaelia chose his words carefully. “…he is afraid, I think. He worries terribly about everything. Especially since the…the murder of our parents. It changed us both, for better or worse.”

His webbed hands shook before him, more violently by the minute. Solveig noticed the trembling some time ago but hadn’t the confidence to bring it up.

“Speaking of my brother, I must pay him a visit now,” he said, already sliding back into the water. “I’ll return soon.”

With that, the cecaelia disappeared. Once again Solveig found herself alone, filthy and naked in a cave like some kind of animal. The orb still burned, granting her warmth. The fish still sat heavy in her belly.

Now all she needed was clothing and she might feel somewhat human again, she thought. She drifted around the modest space for some time. The stench was terrible. She realized why when she stepped on a pile of rotting kelp and fish corpses, likely weeks dead.

Solveig picked up a slimy driftwood stick, hoped the cecaelia wouldn’t mind as she began to tidy his mess. Not that she was anyone’s housekeeper, she reasoned. She cleaned for her own sake, for she had no idea how long she’d be trapped here. Forever wasn’t the plan. One way or another, she had to get to Redwood Island.

Until then, basic survival was her only concern. She used the stick to rake seaweed and debris into one pile by the shore’s edge. It was a tedious, time-consuming process, but she felt such a sense of accomplishment when she looked upon the tidy space she’d made for herself.

In the treasure chest she recalled seeing an old fishing net. She dug it out and tossed it over the great pile of debris. Throwing it all into the water would just send it washing back in with the next tide.

Whenever the cecaelia returned, she decided she would tell him to take the refuse to the depths, far below the pull of the waves, and then she would lecture him for being such a slob.

The cave went dark.

Solveig turned to the empty space where the orb once hovered. It had suddenly burst with a sharp crackling sound, leaving only the dim, pulsating light of the fungus on the walls.

Not long after, she heard bubbling in the water. A bald, green head surfaced there, gushing water from the gills on its neck. Solveig took a wary step back.

Was this the same cecaelia she knew? In the darkness it was hard to tell. His eyes, once yellow moons in the black skies of his scleras, were now glowing a piercing bright green.

He crawled onto the shore with little grace, slipping and stumbling over himself. Long strings of green saliva oozed from his mouth. He regarded her with no kind of greeting, no acknowledgement at all, as he slumped over silently on the rocks.

Solveig froze in place for quite some time. Watching, waiting, wondering if he had died.

She squinted in the dim light of the orb, saw the gills on his neck gently pulsing. Perhaps he was just asleep. Solveig took a quiet step towards him.

“Hey, are you alright?” she whispered, reaching forth. The moment her fingertips made contact with his shoulder, his entire body jerked.

Solveig jumped back, but not quickly enough. One of his tentacles whipped at an arc and slapped her to the stony ground. The force of it put stars in her eyes, knocking the wind from her lungs.

The cecaelia pushed himself up on shaking arms and turned to face her. His jaw was slack under feral eyes, sickly green ooze still falling from his lips. He gurgled something unintelligible and reached a clawed hand towards her. Solveig was quick to slap it away, scrambling back to the end of the cave.

“What is wrong with you?” she cried, cradling the welt on her cheek. The cecaelia explained nothing. He didn’t seem capable of reason anymore as he wobbled and gurgled like a dying beast. Now he was coming towards her, sluggishly dragging himself on two arms across the rocks.

“What do you want? Get away from me!” howled Solveig. She darted away and tried to climb the tallest boulder in the cave. Her fingers slipped on its slimy surface and down she tumbled again. By the time she turned around, the cecaelia had already advanced on her, fingers grasping at her hair.

“I said _get away from me_!” the human shrieked, high and shrill. She pulled his sloppy grip off her head, a lock or two ripping free, and bolted away. There was nowhere to hide. Her only option was to fight. Solveig’s heart raced, limbs quivering as she clumsily threw open the old chest.

Inside was a gourd bowl. Leather jewelry. Bone cutlery. Wooden dish. Hide canteen. Hog’s hair brushes in a variety of sizes. Then she found it—the ancient knife, sitting at the rotted bottom of the chest.

She whipped around, holding it tightly in her grip. She was ready to strike, to jam the dull thing straight through the cecaelia’s eye and into his brain.

But it seemed she didn’t have to. There he lie helplessly, bonelessly, by the slimy boulder. As if all the strength had left his body, he could barely lift his head, much less pursuit her. He was left to gurgle and writhe here for some time as Solveig watched from a distance. She dared not approach him again.

In this cave of eternal night, time had become just a distant memory. Solveig didn’t know how much time passed before the cecaelia fell quiet and still. She thought him dead once more until finally, he let out a long groan. The knife hadn’t left her grip. Her fingers tightened around it, watching him carefully, ready to strike.

The cecaelia’s back lurched once, twice, three times before he spit up a gush of green slime. When he opened his eyes, Solveig saw their familiar yellow rings. The green glow was gone. So too was the horrid drool. Slowly, laboriously he pushed himself upright and shook the fatigue away.

Still the human was wary. She crouched behind the chest, could probably hide inside of it if she felt so inclined. From its rounded top she peeked out at the cecaelia. He turned this way then that, as if searching for something. He called her name.

“Solveig?”

But Solveig was reluctant to respond.

“Solveig?” he called again, slithering to and fro, looking in all the nooks and crannies of the jagged rocks. Now he was approaching the chest. Solveig had no choice. She stood up tall, made herself known as she brandished the knife high. The cecaelia jumped, stopping in his tracks before her.

“You struck me,” she told him sharply.

The cecaelia cocked his head. “I struck you?”

“My face! You slapped me down like an insect!” she shouted, rubbing the red welt on her cheek. “What was that all about? What happened to you?”

A silence passed. The cecaelia furrowed his brows at first, puzzled. Then they arched in wide-eyed horror. He slapped his webbed fingers over his mouth, tipped his head and hid his face in shame. “Oh no, no, no, no…” he muttered.

“Why did you attack me, you devil? Tell me now!” Solveig demanded. She raised the knife high, though it would still be a stretch to reach the towering creature’s head. She knew she didn’t stand a chance. That wasn’t the point.

The cecaelia replied quickly, “The medicine! It—it takes my head away, and with it, all my pain and grief.”

“And your damned senses too,” added Solveig. “You don’t even remember hitting me?”

The cecaelia turned away from her, the shame burning much too hot. “No,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t remember anything. I’m very sorry, Solveig.”

“You said you wouldn’t hurt me!” Solveig growled with a stamp of her bare foot. It slapped softly against the stone beneath. “I can’t trust you either! My parents, my people, _your_ people, and now you—the gods must really thirst for my blood!”

“Solveig—”

“I’ve had enough! I’m no god’s plaything!” the human screeched, raising the knife’s edge above her throat.

Before she could plunge the blade down, clawed hands caught her by both wrists. The cecaelia loomed over her, clutching them tightly.

“You devil! You devil! Let me go! Let me die!” she wailed. Thrashing and squirming in his grip, it was no use. The cecaelia wrenched the knife from her with ease and pulled her away from the chest.

He pushed her to the stony floor. She kicked, screamed, spit at him and bit any part of him her teeth could reach. Still he held her down until she grew too weak to carry on.

She sat panting in his cage of tentacles, at least one wrapped around each of her limbs. The human gave one last half-hearted thrash before collapsing on the ground.

“You’re making a mistake. I know you don’t really want to die,” the cecaelia said softly. “There is too much fight in you.”

Solveig replied hoarsely, “You’re right, I don’t. I want to go to Redwood Island! But that isn’t an option now, is it?” She sat up, tossing the tangle of damp hair out of her face. They stared eachother down eye to eye, yellow to hazel.

“Just give me time,” the cecaelia told her, and then his grip on her loosened. He slithered back, giving her the space to rise.

“What are you saying? Are you taking me there or not?” she queried.

“I…” the cecaelia closed his mouth, shook his head. “I will try. Please, just give me time.”

He sank to the floor, suddenly drained of energy. Rolling onto his back, he scrubbed his fingers over his aching head. Solveig hovered over him, arms crossed tightly when she said, “That medicine is horrid! Don’t take it anymore! It’s poison!”

“I must,” the cecaelia replied wearily, “or I’ll be sick.”

“It _makes_ you sick!”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain yourself! You owe it to me!” the human barked, plopping down beside him. She crossed her legs, resting her jaw in her hands.

The cecaelia let out a sigh. It gurgled softly in the back of his throat. He told her again of the incident and the grisly murder of his parents, the clan king and queen.

“It changed Tekee forever,” he said. “But it changed me the most. I was stricken with grief. It weighed so heavily that I could scarcely move, could scarcely eat. My hearts were beating, yet there was no life in me at all. I knew my brother was the only one who could help me.”

The cecaelia sat up, raked a hand over his smooth head as he went on, “He said my affliction ran deeply through my brain. He developed a powerful herb to make me well again, called it _greenbrite_. At midnight, sunrise, and sunset, I return to my brother for the greenbrite. So long as I take it, I have life in me again.”

Solveig’s brows wrinkled. “If he’s such a master of medicine, why can’t he come up with something better? Something that doesn’t turn you into a drooling, mindless fool?”

“Curative magic is a complex science. I can’t even begin to understand it. I just know that all magic comes with sacrifice.”

That said, he noticed Solveig quiver. He rubbed his hands together, willing a spark between them to reshape the glowing orb. There it hovered in the center of the cave, casting its warm light upon them both.

“So you’re a slave to your brother,” said Solveig.

“Not to him,” the cecaelia insisted, “but to my own sickness.”

The human’s eyes rolled back. She almost launched into an argument, but thought better of it and closed her mouth. It wasn’t worth what little energy she had.

“You don’t even know how sick you really are,” she told him, rising to her feet. She wiped the slime off a flat, smooth boulder and lay down across it.

Before she drifted to sleep, she pointed to the net full of refuse and added, “I cleaned up your mess while you were away. Please take it out of here, it smells rancid. Just because you live alone doesn’t mean you have to wallow in filth.”

Sick One turned to the net. Only then did he notice just how tidy the cave was. It hadn’t looked so clean since the day he discovered it. Without a word, perhaps in shame, he dragged the net away into the deep.

He pushed it through the cavern entrance, shook out all the kelp and bones and crawling vermin. Finally he returned them back to Gaia after hoarding them for entirely too long.

When he surfaced in the cave, he found Solveig curled up on the boulder, silent and motionless. He dropped the net, watching her for some time. Minutes ago she brandished a knife at him. Now she slept in his presence.

“Thank you, Solveig,” he whispered, and then he crept back into the water.

*


	2. Eternal Night

##  **[CHAPTER 2: ETERNAL NIGHT]**

Solveig woke under the starry sky. For a few bleary seconds, she wondered why she’d fallen asleep outside. Then everything came flooding back like a waking nightmare and she realized it was only the sparkling fungus of the cave.

A strange, cool weight pressed down on her. The human sat up, squinting in the darkness, for the orb had disappeared again. Her eyes rounded.

It was her blanket, the very same she’d snagged before fleeing her husband. She thought it would protect her from the biting cold of the night, only to end up jumping into the sea. But what was it doing here?

It was not wet, but cool and damp as if wrung out tightly. Its once brilliant zig-zags of orange, yellow, and red fibers were faded with exposure. It smelled briny like the ocean.

Solveig heard a soft groan. She squinted in the darkness, and on the opposite end of the cave she could make out a black lump of shadow. It shifted and squirmed a little before settling again.

Was it day? Night? How long had she slept? There was no way of knowing.

Quietly Solveig crept towards the shadow, minding every footfall. She stopped some distance away, able to see its shape in soft relief from the fungus’ glow.

It was the cecaelia, as she suspected. He seemed to be coming out of his medicinal daze again, but this time, he had somehow tangled himself in the refuse-net.

He was all a jumble of tentacles and contorted limbs. Where one side of him ended and the other began, Solveig couldn’t tell. In such a state, he couldn’t chase her if he wanted to.

The cecaelia writhed before finally regurgitating the last of the green ooze. She was relieved to see his yellow eyes again. Those eyes blinked out of tandem, struggling to focus. He shut them tight, then focused on the naked, wary human staring back at him.

“Solveig,” he rasped. Solveig’s shoulders sank with relief. It seemed they’d found a solution.

She helped to untangle the cecaelia’s many limbs from the net. Once he gained his senses back, the knots weren’t as complex as they looked.

“You found my blanket,” mentioned Solveig, tipping her head towards the boulder where it lie in a rumpled heap.

The cecaelia’s voice was still creaky when he replied, “It was floating by the cliffside. Is it _clothes_?”

Solveig bared her teeth at him again. “No,” she said. “We don’t wear it, we just sleep under it to keep warm at night.”

The cecaelia furrowed his hairless brows, tilting his head in puzzlement.

“Why not simply wear it?” he asked.

Solveig bared her teeth a second time, throwing up her hands. “Because we humans are ridiculous, I suppose…”

“Solveig, how have I angered you?”

“What? I’m not angry at all. Why would you think that?”

“You keep flashing your teeth at me,” explained the cecaelia, circling his finger towards her face. “What does it mean?”

Solveig paused. The cecaelia shrank back when she bared her teeth a third time, letting out a hearty laugh. “That’s a _smile_!” she exclaimed. “It doesn’t mean I’m angry, it means I’m happy!”

“You’re happy? Truly?”

Solveig shrugged, her smile fading. “You just make me laugh, that’s all. No wonder your face is so stony, if you don’t even know how to smile.”

“No, I know how,” he said. “It just means something very different to my kind.”

“It’s a sign of anger, then.”

“It’s actually the warning before we bite.”

“Oh.” The human’s eyebrows jumped. She recalled his mouth, full of crowded, jagged teeth.

The cecaelia left again to fetch a meal. He returned with three oysters and cuts of fresh seaweed. Solveig held her nose and ate everything he offered. If she was to survive long enough to make it to Redwood Island, she had little choice.

After their meal, the human and the cecaelia spoke for hours while Solveig carefully cut the blanket to pieces. She cut a rectangle free, thread by thread with the sharp edge of the arrowhead. With it she could make a top. Then she cut two more pieces which would be her skirt and shawl.

She used a fine fishbone as a needle, sewing the pieces together with the extra fibers as thread. The cecaelia watched in fascination. The closest thing to “clothing” he knew was scaled armor, worn only by the Tekeetian warriors.

“You know,” began Solveig, biting a stubborn thread, “you still haven’t given me your name.”

“I still don’t have one,” he reminded her. “Everyone calls me what they like. It’s just our way.”

“Alright. I’ll call you Sea-Devil.”

A sigh gusted through the cecaelia’s nostrils. “If you must,” he muttered.

Solveig bared her teeth. A _smile_, he reminded himself.

“You don’t like it,” she said knowingly.

“No. I do not.”

“What about Stoneface?”

“If it makes you happy.”

The human stroked her chin, said, “I can tell you don’t like that either. Why don’t you choose your own name?”

“I don’t know how. What is the significance of a name?”

The question caught Solveig off-guard. She pondered it for a moment. Then she replied, “Your name should say something about you. My mother says she named me Solveig because my smile was as bright as the sun. It means ‘sunshine’ in the old language our ancestors spoke.”

The cecaelia nodded thoughtfully. “Your mother chose wisely,” he said. She flashed a sunny smile back at him as he made his decision.

“Then my name will be Ocean,” he told her, “because all my life I’ve been bound to it. Is that a good name?”

“It’s perfect,” Solveig said brightly. She tied a strip of the blanket tightly around her torso. The fabric covered her breasts, reaching down to the top of her naval.

Then she slipped on the skirt, secured it with a length of rope she’d braided from leftover fibers. Its tasseled edges touched her knees, a bit asymmetrical where she’d sewn the seam unevenly. Finally she draped the shawl around her shoulders, tying the front in a neat little bow at her collarbones.

She spun on her toes and her new garment billowed around her. “What do you think, Ocean?” she asked.

Ocean replied, “I don’t know what to think.”

“Come on. Didn’t I do a good job?”

The cecaelia squinted at the seams of her skirt, looking over her work carefully. After a long moment he decided, “I feel I cannot judge your clothes if I don’t know their purpose.”

“You’re impossible!” Solveig groaned, plopping down on a rock. “They’re for modesty, so I’m not running around naked like an animal.”

Ocean blinked. “Do you think my kind animals?”

Solveig’s spotty cheeks darkened. She bit her careless tongue. “No, no,” she explained. “It’s different. The Blackoak people, we…we only show our skin to those we love. That’s just the way it is.”

“I see.” Ocean nodded, falling into a ponderous silence. He still had so much to learn, it was almost overwhelming. Even more overwhelming was the journey to Redwood Island.

Somehow he had to find a way. Not only for Solveig’s sake, but for his own as well. She just may be his key to unlocking the secrets of Terria. He’d been waiting, watching, _obsessing_ for so very long, it was now or never.

He made a silent promise to himself. He would not let this opportunity slip through his grasp.

*

Time was but an illusion in the cecaelia’s cave. Solveig only knew it passed when Ocean left for his medicine. She threw the old net over him when he returned, and in his state he would get himself hopelessly tangled.

Day by day, she feared him less and less. He was hardly different than the drunkards at Blackoak, slaves to their fermented berry juice.

Solveig never realized just how hardy she was until this chapter of her life. She could tolerate eternal night, eating raw spoils from the sea, and wearing tattered rags so long as she knew it wasn’t forever.

Hope drove her onward. She thought of her new life on Redwood Island, where she was bound to no one. No family, no elders, no strings. At last, she would live life for herself.

Her daydreams carried her through the mind-numbing boredom when Ocean was gone. But he was never gone for long, for he always neglected the beach in favor of her company.

The more she spoke of Terria, the more he longed to see it for himself. He grew bolder every day he spent with her, more desperate to get to Redwood Island, more willing to leave everything he knew in the past.

Only the greenbrite tethered him here.

But Ocean had a plan. He just needed more time. “When the warm season comes,” he assured Solveig. She would simply have to take his word for it.

Between midnight and sunrise, the cecaelia returned to the cave with a mesh satchel full of clams and mussels. Solveig was squatting over the shallow trench near the wall when he arrived.

She always yelled at him for watching her relieve herself, though he didn’t understand why, for she never scolded him for watching her eat or retch.

It was just another human behavior he’d simply have to get used to. He averted his eyes and began sorting his catch on the smooth, flat boulder she called a “kitchen”.

He jumped when he heard her gasp. He whipped his head towards her, cared not for her privacy if she might be in danger. She examined her hand, streaked red with blood. Then, to Ocean’s surprise, she looked up at him with a wide, open smile.

“Solveig, are you alright?” he asked, fingers wringing anxiously. But Solveig’s smile remained as she rapidly scrubbed her hands in the water, then stood up and bolted towards him. He flinched, though she only squeezed him around the middle in a tight embrace.

Now she was crying. Though he couldn’t cry himself, Ocean knew it wasn’t a good sign. She must have been very upset.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he urged her. “Are you hurt?”

Solveig shook her head against him, sniffled, “No, I’m happy! Praise, praise, praise the gods! Thank you, thank you!”

She withdrew, wiping her tears with her palms. “That pig I married said he’d blacken my eyes if I didn’t give him a son.” She turned up to the starry ceiling, voice echoing off the rocks when she shouted, “You’ll get nothing out of me, Hemming! Not a damned thing!”

Ocean watched, puzzled and concerned as she broke into mad laughter. He touched her shoulders and gently guided her towards the kitchen.

“It’s time to eat,” he said.

They sat together around the stone, crackling shells with smaller stones. Solveig did so with a persistent little smile, her gaze somehow absent. Ocean could still smell blood on her.

“Are you bleeding?” he asked. Perhaps he wasn’t the curative wizard his brother was, but he could tie a decent enough tourniquet with kelp. Solveig’s gaze flicked up to him.

“Um, yes. It’s fine,” she answered quietly. Her gaze quickly fell again. She busied her mouth with food.

The answer didn’t satisfy Ocean. Was she so foolish? “It is not ‘fine’,” he told her. “We must stop the bleeding. Where is the wound?”

Solveig coughed, spitting up a piece of her meal. She said, “There’s no _wound_! It just happens. We humans—well, us women—we bleed every month for about seven days. It means we’re not with child.”

The cecaelia raised his eyebrows. “You bleed for seven days straight? How do you survive?”

“Ask the gods,” Solveig replied with a shrug, popping another bite in her mouth.

“The sirenes,” began Ocean, “they look much like your kind, at least from the waist up. They are legless and tailed. But their young hatch within them and feed off their milk. Is it the same with humans?”

Solveig chuckled. “We don’t lay eggs, if that’s what you’re asking. I take it cecaelia do?”

“Yes. Our females lay them in clutches of four or five. Or just two, in the case of my brother and I. We were something of an anomaly.”

“I’m an anomaly too,” Solveig said. “All the girls in the village obsess over starting a family, like it’s all they live for. But I never wanted children. They seem such a burden to me. Everyone tells me I’ll change my mind, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

Her eyes flicked up at the cecaelia sitting across from her. “What about you? Did you ever have children?”

Ocean met her gaze only briefly. Cracking open another mussel, he replied, “No, no. Defective as I am, my breeding rights were revoked long ago.”

Solveig quirked an eyebrow. “Breeding rights?”

“The right to breed,” he clarified. “There are few females to go around, you see, and they can only lay one clutch every half-century or so. So the clan royalty decides which males should have breeding rights and which should not.”

“And your own brother wouldn’t grant that to you?” The question flatly emerged from Solveig, more of a statement.

Ocean shrugged. “I don’t expect him to compromise the clan for my sake. He is a wise king. He cares for our people deeply.”

“So,” began Solveig, speaking over her food, “is this what happens to the males without a female? They become strange slobs and hoard women in filthy caves?”

He turned to her. She was smiling back at him. Jesting, teasing. Sometimes it was hard for him to tell.

He smiled back with his eyes and replied, “Some accept their loneliness. Most choose another male for companionship. Others consort with sirenes, though they usually prefer to keep to their own kind just as we do.”

“But not you? Where’s _your_ companion?”

“I’ve never sought one. I have nothing to offer anyone.”

“You’re so hard on yourself,” said Solveig. “You saved my life when the rest of your ilk wanted me dead. I’d say you have a kind heart to offer.”

“My people don’t value that,” Ocean replied sullenly.

Finishing her meal, Solveig pushed the empty shells aside and said, “Everything will be different when we get to Redwood Island. We can both start a new life. We’ll answer to no one.”

*

Week by week, the rainy season was passing by.

The warm season would arrive soon, and with it, a very special day in Tekee. It would be the anniversary of the murders, the day the king and queen fell. It was on this day that Ocean plotted to break into the globeholder and steal greenbrite pods from the garden.

Security was always scarce on this day except around the clan king, who would be paraded through the winding paths of Tekee for hours while his people declared their love for him.

With the pods, Ocean could cultivate his own greenbrite on Redwood Island. He and his brother had been growing distant for centuries. The greenbrite was the last frayed thread holding them together, and the last string that tied Ocean to Tekee at all.

That was still some time away. In the meantime, the cecaelia was bound to the promise he made to Solveig. Every day, he dutifully cared for her to the best of his ability.

Yet every day, she seemed to wilt a little more. She was sluggish, her once rich brown complexion graying, a terrible cough rattling her lungs.

“What can I do to help you?” Ocean asked her.

Solveig lurched with another cough, shook her head and replied, “Nothing. I just miss the sunshine.”

The sun, Ocean knew, was a being of pure flame. Bound to the water his whole life, fire was foreign to him. Never had he even touched it, so how could he understand it?

He didn’t. But he did understand the properties of air and light, having spent countless, thoughtful days on the beach.

He played with light on overcast days while he waited for the Islanders—the Blackoak tribe—to show. Illusions became his specialty as he entertained himself with magical light, concentrating it to the tips of his fingers to conjure figures in the air. He’d grown to know light well, could stretch and bend it in his grasp like a rubbery strand of kelp.

So while Ocean couldn’t give Solveig the sun, he gave her the closest thing he could muster. He picked up the orb that kept her warm and rolled it smoothly between his hands. Larger and larger it bulged as he willed more magic forth, brow furrowed in concentration, arms quivering with exertion.

The cecaelia pulled light from every source he could to feed the orb. Gradually the sparkling fungus dimmed. Its light leapt from it like white fleas into the orb, the webs of fungus left shadowy-black. The orb doubled in size, then doubled once more, so bright that even Solveig shielded her Terrian eyes.

Ocean was left utterly blind as he lifted the orb above his head and sucked in a long gasp of air. He blew it out slowly, his wind pushing the orb ever higher. It floated as weightless as a jellyfish in the waves. When it touched the ceiling, there it remained. Its warmth spread to every corner of the cave, and so too did its brilliant light.

Perhaps it wasn’t true sunlight, but if Solveig didn’t know better, she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Looking up to the ceiling, it appeared as if she were looking at a fault in its structure, the high noon sun beaming down into the cave.

Like the sun, it pained her eyes to look at its core. So she looked back at Ocean with a smile.

“Ocean, I love it! It’s so warm and beautiful, just like the sun,” she told him. “And you say you’re no wizard!”

“It’s only a simple illusion,” he said modestly.

Solveig chuckled. “Well, _I_ can’t make illusions.”

“A lie is an illusion too, you know,” mentioned the cecaelia, “and one that, with all my magic, I will never be capable of.”

Pondering this for a moment, Solveig replied, “Good point. Then I say we’re both very powerful wizards!”

The cecaelia would have shot her a smile with his eyes, but they currently strained in the bright rays of the orb. Now the cave was as punishing as a clear, sunny day on the beach—the days Ocean never bothered to surface, for he couldn’t see the Blackoak people anyway.

He didn’t tell Solveig this. Then she would protest, demand that he kill the light for his own sake. The more time she spent with him, the less selfish she became. She was kind to him. She cared for his well-being. Though Ocean had to wonder if it was just a human illusion.

A _lie_.

What if she only feigned concern because she depended on him? Would she abandon him the moment they touched Redwood Island?

No matter how she felt about him, Ocean would never—_could_ never—abandon Solveig. He was bound by the promise he made to her.

*

“Late again,” rumbled the clan king. Ocean shoved a passing guard out of his way as he approached the throne, collapsing at his brother’s tentacles.

He was late indeed. His brother needn’t punish him, for his own body was already at it. Violent spasms jerked Ocean’s muscles from end to end. He clawed at the stony floor beneath him, spine arched like a bridge.

“P-p-please…” he stammered. It was all he could manage through his chattering, churning jaw. The clan king looked down his long nose at his brother and slowly shook his head.

“If only you took your health more seriously, you wouldn’t suffer so,” he said, then he turned to the scrawny guard posted to his right. “Bright Keeper, fetch his medicine. Quickly, before the poor thing retches on my floors.”

Beach-glass beads dangled from the sides of Bright Keeper’s helmet, clacking together when he bowed his head. He rushed off down the corridor, leaving Ocean to wait in agony. The sickly cecaelia rolled onto his side and curled in on himself. His black claws dug into his arms, trying hopelessly to steady the shake of his hands.

“What kept you this time?” asked the clan king. “What could possibly be more important than your own well-being?”

Ocean held his tongue. The truth threatened to rattle from him; a truth that his brother could never stomach. It was Solveig’s condition that kept him. A week passed since she fell ill and she was only getting worse.

She had suddenly collapsed while squatting over the trench, and though the midnight hour was passing, Ocean stayed to tend to her. He only left after she ate a bite of food and fell asleep.

He could tell his brother none of this.

So he simply settled with an apology. “I’m s-s-sorry, brother.”

The clan king sucked in a deep breath. It gusted slowly out through his nostrils when he said, “I don’t need your apologies. You should be apologizing to yourself, my poor, pitiful clutch-mate.”

Brite Keeper soon returned with the parcel, wrapped in kelp and dangling from a string. Ocean’s nerves were so frayed, he reached out to swipe it and missed twice. Brite Keeper chuckled, a raspy gurgling sound, and played a cruel game of keep-away.

“What’s wrong, Sick One? Just take it if you want it,” Brite Keeper taunted. Ocean snarled as he grasped for the parcel, only to have it jerked away for the sixth time. He glanced over at his brother. The clan king saw the struggle and said nothing, turning away with disinterest.

Ocean had been at odds with Brite Keeper since the day the clan king appointed him as his right-hand lackey. The position had gone to the young cecaelia’s head, transforming him into a loathsome little pest in the blink of an eye. Only when he grew bored of teasing his sickly half-brother, Brite Keeper finally let him have his medicine.

Ocean said nothing as he left, stuffing the entire parcel in his mouth before he even left the throne room. If he hurried, the greenbrite would soothe his agony by the time he reached his cave.

*

Solveig woke. Something was thrashing in the water behind her. She shot upright on her boulder, saw two little green orbs staring back at her through the darkness.

It was Ocean, she realized, only it really wasn’t. The medicine took Ocean away and replaced him with this mindless devil whose intentions she didn’t care to know.

So with a laborious heave, she threw the net over him as he approached. He thrashed around and only got himself more tangled in it.

The magical sun above was gone. It disappeared after the greenbrite took him over, for he was always conciously maintaining its presence. The greenbrite took his consciousness away, and so Solveig was left to shiver in the cold darkness while he writhed uselessly in the net.

The faint chatter of her teeth echoed off the walls. Solveig had no energy to spare, yet her traitorous body shook and shook when all she wanted was to sleep. She suffered for what felt like an eternity.

At last, the cecaelia came to his senses. He quickly disentangled himself from the net and willed magic to his hands. He struggled through his weariness, the light fizzling out in a few false starts.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he muttered to the shaking human. He gnashed his teeth as he tried once more, pulling magic from its core in his skull, down through his throat, chest, arms, and to the hands. Cecaelia were the only fae who carried their magic in their heads, he was told. The sirenes supposedly carried it in their hearts.

Emotions drove the sirenes’ magic forth, but cecaelia relied purely on their intellect. The greenbrite left Ocean’s brain ravaged and weak. His entire body quaked with exertion as he nurtured the sun between his hands. After it returned to its place on the ceiling, he collapsed in a boneless heap.

His eyes cracked open. The blinding light above strained his vision. A dark figure then loomed over his view, its voice muffled as if speaking through water.

“Ocean…Ocean…”

Slowly the figure came into focus. Its vague shape sharpened into a human, and when Ocean blinked, the bold shadows upon her lifted. Solveig looked down at him with big, round eyes.

“Ocean!” she called again. The cecaelia felt his shoulder being jostled. He wobbled as he pulled himself upright with a groan, and in that instant, Solveig’s fear turned to relief. She pressed a hand to her sinking chest. “Oh, thank the gods…”

Ocean had told her of arcane fatigue. It could be deadly, he said, when a fae exerted too much magic at once. Magic was as natural to their blood as iron to a humans’. To squeeze every last particle from their beings spelled a painful doom.

But now all was well as the orb warmed Solveig’s skin. Well for the moment, at least.

“I won’t last in here. This cave is draining the life out of me,” she told the cecaelia. They lie side by side in their fatigue. She turned to him with a frown and added, “It’s draining the life out of us both.”

*

Three more days passed. Solveig’s condition was on a sharp downward spiral. Early this morning she sputtered up blood and lost consciousness, and in an instant, Ocean’s plan fell to shambles.

Plan or not, he had to act. Today.

Getting his hands on some greenbrite pods was key. Otherwise he would arrive on Redwood Island, only for his sickness to consume him. He would rot away, abandoning Solveig, and this would all be for nothing.

But there were too many guards in the globeholder now, no way to sneak into the garden with so many eyes upon him.

Unless those eyes didn’t recognize him.

Ocean lingered around Tekee for some time, closely watching the globeholder’s mouth. Hardly anyone went in or out unless the guards were changing shifts, and then a group of them would leave at once just as another headed inside. Ocean had to somehow subdue one of them and take their armor, but isolating them proved impossible.

Just as he was losing hope, someone else left the mouth of the globeholder. It was Brite Keeper, the clan king’s lackey, probably sent out for some mundane errand. He too was armored, though Ocean could only imagine him getting destroyed in any kind of combat. For him, the armor was purely a status symbol.

For Ocean, it was the start of a new life. He followed Bright Keeper at a distance, keeping to the shadows of stone and forests of kelp. The lackey drifted through paths well travelled along the seafloor, between Tekee’s organic, cavernous structures. Only hunters dared to drift too far into the open water above, and only in groups, for hungry aquatic predators lurked in the wild.

Bright Keeper disappeared into a cave. Its exterior was decorated with a mosaic of colorful shells. Ocean waited, peeking through a growth of swaying kelp. He saw the lackey exit, and then he decided it was time to make his move.

He blocked Bright Keeper’s path, feigning panic. “You,” he clicked in their underwater language, “you must come with me now! I need your help!”

Bright Keeper regarded him skeptically. “I’m busy, Sick One. Find someone else,” he said. Ocean seized his wrist when he tried to pass, clutching the scaly gauntlet in an iron grip.

“It’s urgent!” Ocean told him. “Follow me now or someone may die! Please!”

The lackey’s expression softened. If one of their own was in trouble, he was bound by the clan king’s law to help. Reluctantly he followed as Ocean darted away into the blue.

They passed over the outskirts, where green kelp farms swayed rhythmically below. They were quickly getting far from civilization.

“What is going on? Who’s in danger?” Bright Keeper clicked ahead.

Ocean replied vaguely, “Just hurry!” and swam on. Eventually he stopped in a barren stretch of water. Blue murk surrounded them on all sides but below, where there lie nothing but dead sands.

The sun’s light could not penetrate these depths. Cecaelia boasted perfect vision in this world of blackness, and though he turned all around, Brite Keeper could not find the emergency. Just as he turned back to question Ocean, he found himself being tackled to the ground.

A plume of sand rose in the impact, blinding them both in the murk. Ocean pinned the lackey down in a flurry of flailing, tangling tentacles.

Bright Keeper said nothing. He only let out long, rapid clicks of fury and fear. So far did they carry, but not far enough, for no one was coming to his aid as Ocean ripped at his scaled neck-plate.

If he could remove the plate, he could bite the throat. If he could bite the throat, he could detach the head. Ocean didn’t wish to _kill_ the lackey, no matter how much he loathed him. He only needed to subdue him long enough to impersonate him. With all their pesky limbs, decapitation was the ideal way to subdue a cecaelia.

The strong but flexible plate was fastened by ties of sinew. Ocean shoved Brite Keeper’s head against the sand and began blindly gnawing at his throat. He felt the ties on his tongue and ripped at them with his pointed teeth. Brite Keeper thrashed beneath him, clicking and squealing for help.

One of the ties snapped. Ocean dug his claws beneath the neck-plate and ripped it away with one hard pull. It tumbled through the water before settling in the sand.

Bright Keeper saw him bare his teeth and reacted in an instant. With a sudden boost of adrenaline, he managed to slip his head free of Ocean’s pressing hand.

He intercepted the bite with a headbutt. Ocean saw a burst of red when the armored helm struck his face. A plume of blood wafted from his nose. Stunned, he lost his strength for just a second, but a second was all Bright Keeper needed to get the upper hand.

The lackey wrestled Ocean onto his belly. Reaching for the arsenal of weapons on his belt, he bypassed his dagger in favor of the hollow bone darts.

The darts were only the size of a cecaelia’s slender finger. Bright Keeper had a blowgun to launch them, but he didn’t need it. Rather, he stabbed a dart directly into the back of Ocean’s neck. Ocean clicked out in pain. Jerking backward, he overpowered the lackey once more.

His reign lasted but a few seconds. His racing hearts pumped the dart’s poison through his veins, sapping his strength in its wake. Ocean rapidly lost control of his muscles. The tentacles that tangled around Bright Keeper’s loosened like lifeless eels, and before long he sunk bonelessly to the sandy floor.

Bright Keeper was spouting fury at him, but he could barely pay attention. He tried desperately to regain control, to move even one finger. The paralyzation ran so deep that he couldn’t even blink. Powerful as the effect was, he knew it wouldn’t last long.

That’s why the lackey wasted little time ripping the dart out of his neck and replacing it in his sharkskin belt. Then Ocean’s heart filled with dread as he found himself being dragged back to Tekee.

*


	3. Clan King's Punishment

##  **[CHAPTER 3: CLAN KING’S PUNISHMENT]**

“I’m not happy with you, Brother,” said the clan king.

It was the understatement of the century. Bright Keeper threw Ocean before the king with a lot of vitriol to spit, and Ocean could defend himself from none of it, for he could only speak wretched truths.

He had really attacked one of his own—his own half-brother at that—for the sake of a primitive terrian. How he would have to twist and mangle his words to explain himself out of this mess, to keep Solveig hidden away alongside his bizarre motives.

Excuses raced through Ocean’s head as his brother glared down at him.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to use any of them. The clan king had already made a confident assumption.

“You have truly lost your mind,” decided the king. “You’ve let your desperation consume you! Don’t you recall what happened the last time your hunger got the better of you?”

How could Ocean forget? Even now he was banished from his own childhood home.

“I remember,” he said quietly, guilty gaze fixated on the floor. The strength was returning to his limbs. He stood before his brother’s thrones in a circle of royal guards.

Each one of them looked upon the sickly cecaelia with disgust. How they long dreamed of driving their spears through his skull, thought Ocean. He had brought shame upon their people for centuries.

The king rumbled back, “You remember, yet you let it happen again! All over some medicine that, if you had just been patient, I would have granted to you anyway!” His rising voice made his sickly brother flinch. “You nearly killed your own, and for absolutely nothing!”

“I didn’t intend to kill him,” mentioned Ocean.

He flinched again when the king’s anger boomed, “That is hardly the point, you pest!”

The guards’ yellow eyes were as cinders glowing beneath the shadow of their helmets. Ocean held himself rigidly against their piercing glares.

A long, heavy sigh gurgled from the king. He reclined back in his thrones, fingers scrubbing at his blubbery face. After a pause, he went on calmly, “My poor, sickly, _stupid_ clutch-mate…I know it is not your fault you are the way you are. I doubt you even understand the gravity of your actions.”

He reached for the long staff leaning on the throne to his left. Its handle was carved from a great whale’s bone, tipped with a crystal orb as clear as a bubble.

“Regardless, you must be punished,” he said. “May the pain make its mark upon you, so that you will think twice before ever harming your own again.”

With that, he waved the staff in a graceful circle. The crystal orb lit up like a star, and then he tapped it upon his brother’s head. The throne room began to spin before Ocean’s eyes.

He heard waves welling up in the distance. Within seconds, those waves were crashing violently against his brain as a storm raged in his skull. The pain was unlike anything he’d suffered before. It was all-encompassing, shooting in relentless pulses through his every nerve.

Ocean’s ragged screech ripped through the room. Guards watched with satisfaction as he dropped to the floor and writhed in agony. He couldn’t think. His system was thrown into a blind panic, pulling out every solution it knew to save his life.

It forced vomit from his mouth, oily black waste from his cloaca, purging what it assumed to be a terrible poison ravaging him.

In Ocean’s head was a thrashing, angry typhoon—or so it felt. In reality, the clan king had simply manipulated the water in his brain. All it took was one magical pulse to disrupt everything and debilitate his victim.

In this case, his own brother.

Slowly the pain subsided as the water in Ocean’s skull settled. He lie on the floor in a daze, trying to blink the blur from his vision. The clear nictitating membranes flashed below his fleshy lids, making four lids total, and they all blinked out of tandem while he regained his composure.

Ocean tried to push himself upright. His palm slipped in a puddle of his own waste and he hit the floor, leaving a black streak across the king’s fine stone tiles. The guards around him couldn’t help but snicker.

Their cecaelian laughter was unlike the soft sound that chimed from Solveig. It was more a round of throaty clicks, similar to the croaking frogs Ocean heard on the island in the warm season.

The clan king raised his staff and passed a warning glare around the room. The guards quickly silenced themselves.

“You,” said the king, addressing a random guard to his left, “clean up this mess. And you,” he turned to Ocean with a grim scowl, “before you leave, promise me that you will never harm another Tekeetian so long as you live.”

Ocean hesitated. His brother waited, tapping his claws impatiently on the arm of his throne.

Wearily, the sickly one replied, “I promise you, Brother, that I will never harm another Tekeetian so long as I live.”

The clan king leaned forward, staring him down for a long, tense moment. Ocean knew he was searching for holes in his carefully-chosen words.

Satisfied enough, the king settled back with a grunt. “That you should even have to make such a promise is sickening. Dwell upon that. Now, go,” he said, and then he waved his sickly brother away. Ocean wobbled and stumbled his way out of the palace, across the courtyard and through the globeholder’s throat.

Glancing towards his sour lackey, the clan king rumbled a simple order:

“Follow him.”

*

The light flickered out some time ago. Solveig’s heart raced, fearing the worst. She pulled her quivering knees to her chest and waited by the pool for Ocean to return. If he didn’t show, then she was in for a slow and miserable demise.

Another ragged cough shook her, spraying flecks of blood into her hands. She kneeled beside the pool to scrub them, then scrambled back with a shriek when a green, clawed hand shot up from the water. It grasped the stony shore and pulled forth a familiar face.

“Ocean,” Solveig sighed, palm pressed over her thumping heart. The cecaelia pulled himself from the water and struggled to meet her gaze, wincing as if stung. She frowned back. She could already tell that things hadn’t gone as planned.

“I failed,” he told her solemnly. “I’m sorry.”

Solveig’s chest tightened when he said it, her stomach twisting in knots. She asked, “What happened?” though by her posture, her tone, it was as if she didn’t care at all. As if it didn’t matter anymore.

Ocean began weaving a new orb of light as he explained, “I could not isolate a guard. But I did manage to lead my brother’s assistant into the wild. I nearly had him, I swear to you…” He paused to blow on the orb. It drifted weightlessly up to the ceiling and stuck to its rightful place.

Ocean hardly winced at it anymore. Gradually he’d grown accustomed to light by forcing himself to suffer its presence, though he noticed his vision in the deep sea had suffered when he attacked Bright Keeper.

He went on, “…but through the sand, through the darkness, the whelp somehow overpowered me. He struck me down with a dart and dragged me to the palace.”

Solveig’s eyebrows jumped. “He told your brother?”

“Yes,” Ocean replied, slumping over a rock. “Thankfully, Brother’s arrogance spared me an explanation. He assumed I did all of this to get my hands on some greenbrite.”

“Well, you did.”

“Right, but…” Ocean shook his head. “My point is, he still doesn’t know about you, which means all is not lost! I just need to think of another way.” He closed his eyes and sighed, “_Quickly_.”

A silence passed. Ocean jerked when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Solveig looked back at him, expression straight and stony.

“We will get to Redwood Island,” she said sharply. “We will get there alive, together, and we will be _free_. No matter what it takes.”

“No matter what it takes,” Ocean repeated quietly, distantly. Rapidly he birthed and aborted ideas in his mind’s eye, like a roulette of failures. This may take drastic measures, he knew in his heart. Measures, actions, crimes he did not want to commit.

“Solveig,” he began, “I need you to seal another promise from me.”

The human coughed into her arm, replied hoarsely, “What is it?”

“I must promise to disregard my brother’s wishes and do whatever it takes to get to Redwood, even if it means harming my own.”

Solveig was an invaluable asset in this regard. There wasn’t another soul in Tekee that Ocean could ask this of. He’d be reported and imprisoned faster than he could even regret it, and a fae’s promise to themselves meant nothing. Their dedication to others, however, was unbreakable.

Thinking it over, Solveig hesitated. “If you hurt someone again, they probably won’t let you go this time,” she said. Her coppery brows drooped, eyes brimming with more emotions than Ocean knew how to identify.

The thought of her rotting away in this terrible cave while he rotted away in the dungeon had crossed his mind more than once.

But he decided, “It isn’t what I wish to do, but I may not have a choice. As you say, ‘whatever it takes’.” He took her hand, gave it a squeeze. “Please.”

The choice was obvious. It just wasn’t ideal. Solveig sucked in a deep, raspy breath and said, “Promise me, then, that you will disregard your brother’s wishes and do whatever it takes to get us to Redwood Island, even if it means harming your own.”

Ocean didn’t want to seal the promise any more than she did. Still, he began, “I promise you, I will dis—”

Quickly he whirled around, shielding Solveig with his body. Something was thrashing its way out of the pool. An armored cecaelia, green and scrawny as Ocean himself, emerged from the water.

The stranger pulled a short wand of bone from his belt, aimed it at the false sun and fired a beam of blue energy.

Blue webs rapidly spread over the orb and strangled it like a net. In but a second, the orb exploded with a loud crackle. Solveig’s shriek followed as she ducked behind Ocean, both frozen in shock and uncertainty.

Darkness consumed the cave once more. Bright Keeper stood before them, eyes glowing bright yellow. He pointed an accusatory finger at Ocean and snarled in their native tongue, “You sneak! You traitor! Were you not told to leave that _thing_ on the surface?”

“She’s a danger to no one,” Ocean replied, damning the quiver creeping into his voice. He forced himself to stand tall against the lackey, despite years of abuse begging him to cower.

“You speak untruth!” Bright Keeper slithered closer to Ocean, squaring his shoulders. Still the sickly one didn’t cower. He went on, “She’s taken advantage of you! Filled your weak mind with lies! Your strange behavior, it all makes sense!”

He peered over Ocean’s shoulder, glaring down at the shrinking human. “Destroy this wicked enchanter now, before it destroys all of us!” he ordered.

Solveig couldn’t understand the words being exchanged, though she didn’t have to. This stranger wasn’t leaving until she lie dead before him, that much she knew by the fury in his eyes. Identical to Ocean’s, those eyes glowed like flames in the darkness, burning a hole through her resolve.

“I intend to take her to the surface as the king ordered,” Ocean told the lackey truthfully, choosing his words with care. “Then she will never return to Aquaria and she will trouble you no more.”

Bright Keeper wasn’t so easily fooled. “But what about you, Sick One? Do not try to manipulate me. This creature is suffocating you in its grasp! Look at your actions; it’s made a traitor of you!”

He seized Ocean’s shoulders, digging his claws in when he squeezed. “It tricked you into attacking me—your own blood—and now it has you abandoning your people to go shrivel away on the surface! For what purpose? Just _think_, you pitiful fool!”

Twisting out of his grip, Ocean’s palms met the lackey’s chestplate with a forceful shove. He dared to raise his voice when he replied, “You know nothing about her! Only what our brother has told you, and he’s scarcely moved an inch from his thrones for longer than you’ve lived. Why do you blindly trust his word?”

Bright Keeper fell silent. The nose-plate of his helm casted a bold shadow over his eyes as he glowered up at his half-brother.

Finally he reached for the spear on his back and sighed, “You’ve been led so far astray. You must be freed from this devil’s spell.”

The lackey raised the bone-tipped spear high and swerved around him to impale Solveig. She screamed, but Ocean blocked the way in a flurry of swaying tentacles.

“Move!” snarled Bright Keeper.

Ocean replied helplessly, truthfully, “I cannot.”

Bright Keeper lost all patience then, striking Ocean’s face with the blunt end of his spear.

Ocean barely had a chance to react when the lackey then threw him to the floor by his neck for good measure, then slithered over him towards Solveig.

Though her lungs ailed and her muscles quaked, Solveig fled towards the back of the cave. Bright Keeper was just as slow and clumsy on land as Ocean was—even moreso in his restrictive armor. Though that hardly mattered when there was nowhere to hide and Ocean was under oath not to harm his own.

In the darkness, Solveig tripped over a jagged stone and tumbled across the floor. The fall knocked the wind from her lungs and she broke into a coughing fit, helpless against the advancing stranger. Bright Keeper raised his spear once more. Solveig braced for impact.

The impact never came, for Ocean threw a tentacle around the lackey’s face and jerked him backward. Bright Keeper stumbled, flailing to keep his balance.

Every one of Ocean’s limbs wrapped around him like a net and pulled him to the floor. There they wrestled in a tangle of flying tendrils.

The terrible cacophony of their cecaelian growls echoed off the walls. Each one was a rough, clicking, croaking kind of sound, rough and angry as the squeals of a boar before slaughter.

The off-white of their teeth flashed in the darkness. They bared them at eachother uselessly, both bound to a promise to their king that they would never kill their own.

So they were left to writhe and shout until exhaustion claimed one or the other. Either way, Solveig would suffer. Bright Keeper reached for the darts on his belt. But Ocean had gotten wise to that since their last encounter, throwing his elbow against the other’s wrist. They rolled once, twice, nearly falling into the pool.

There were no winners here, Solveig realized, unless she intervened. She scrambled to the kitchen boulder where the ancient knife sat, its blade still stained with fish blood. She’d been sharpening it against the rocks for weeks and now its edge was respectable enough—at least for what she was about to do.

She swiped the knife and made her way to the wriggling mass of tentacles by the pool. If they fell in the water, she’d lose her chance. Her bare feet slipped on a wet stone in her haste, bringing her painfully to her knee. She went down with a hiss and coughed. Specks of blood sprayed forth.

“You’re a victim,” Bright Keeper snarled at his half-brother, “and you’re too blind to see it! Trust in me, this is for your own good!”

“Solveig is mine, and so she is ours! You will not harm her!” Ocean growled back.

But if Bright Keeper didn’t believe so, then it was not his reality and not his truth. Still he fought against the sick one’s weakening grip.

Ocean told him, “We are both victims, but not of the Terrians! We are victims of our own king! Calm yourself and I’ll help you see!”

The lackey couldn’t bear to entertain the idea. “Horrid, despicable traitor!” he bellowed, and then he surged upright. He rolled Ocean forward, wrenching his wrist free of the other’s grip, and reached for his darts.

His slender, quaking fingers fumbled at his belt. He was not quick enough, too distracted to notice the human creeping up from behind. Bright Keeper’s wail seemed to tremble the walls when Solveig drove the knife through his right eye. He reeled back, disentangling himself from Ocean.

Solveig wouldn’t relent, even as he staggered blindly. She threw herself against him to knock him on his back, and from her perch atop his chest, she drove the knife into his eye over and over again. She struck deep, forcing the hilt through his socket until her fist squelched in his gore.

Like a butchered hog, he squealed and thrashed madly beneath her. Solveig held on with all her might. She stabbed the knife so deep into his skull, the blood so slick that she couldn’t pull it out again. She lost her grip and the lackey slapped her away, casting her to the floor.

Ocean watched, silent and slack-jawed. His half-brother squirmed before him, reaching for the knife lodged in his face. His own blood slicked the handle and he could not pull it out. He weakened by the second, tossing about helplessly until he slowed, slowed, slowed.

His left eye fixated on Ocean. It glimmered with fear, disbelief, and the drowning flames of life within him. They shared this silent gaze as the lackey rasped without a word, a curse, or a plea. They knew that instant that fate had made its decision. Nothing could be done to change it.

Ocean watched him fall still. Bright Keeper was dead.

Struggling to sit upright, Solveig’s whole body lurched with every terrible cough. She spit bloody mucus on the rocks before her and gasped for air.

Then she turned to Ocean. The cecaelia stooped over his fallen brother without a word, tenderly caressing his cold face. He felt no pulse in his throat, no warmth to his flesh. Solemnly he closed Bright Keeper’s remaining eyelid with his thumb.

A twinge of regret twisted in Solveig’s gut. “Ocean, I’m so sorry,” she rasped. The cecaelia closed his eyes tightly as if a great pain overtook him.

“Don’t. Don’t speak to me,” he rumbled.

“I had no choice—”

“_Just get out of my sight_!” Ocean bellowed, twisting to face her. He dwarfed the woman in his shadow, and though he bared his teeth in anger, his eyes were glistening with hurt.

Solveig shrank back from him, shielding her face from the blow that never came. She had half a mind to argue with him, to shout back and put him in his place. But the other half was weary, her poor voice spent, so she scurried off into the shadows to let him grieve alone.

She sank down behind a boulder, leaning on its solid face. Her hands were still slick and red with cecaelia blood. It stained her makeshift clothes from the top of her shawl to the bottom of her skirt. Tears welled in her eyes. Her fists shook with anger, fear, and anxiety. Had she the energy, she would have cried.

Solveig couldn’t accept this injustice. It was not her way to allow anyone to trample on her. Her emotions overflowed from her mouth when she exclaimed, “You have no right to be angry! No matter who won that fight, I would’ve lost if he survived! I did exactly what I had to, and how dare you push me away for protecting myself!”

She waited for his reply, but it never came. She growled through her tears, “You’re all I have anymore, Ocean! You’re all I ever will have, whether we make it out of here or not!” Her voice trailed off into a weary croak. “Don’t be cruel to me…I can’t take it…”

Hard coughs shook her to her core. She dropped her head onto her knees in silence, trying to catch her breath. She still hadn’t heard a word from Ocean.

Curiosity got the best of her, so she stood up on quivering knees and groped her way back towards the pool. The great orb had spoiled her, and now she found it difficult to navigate by the light of the fungus.

She reached the dark, dead mass lying by the water. She called for Ocean, but he was nowhere to be found. He’d left her alone with Bright Keeper’s corpse, completely stripped of its armor.

The knife was gone.

*

Ocean kept his head down as he passed through the globeholder’s airlock. The Bright Keeper’s helmet obscured his face well enough from a distance, the armor hiding most of his unique markings.

He had no choice but to act now. His next dose of greenbrite was due soon. Ocean crossed the courtyard and peeked around a white archway into the palace. There sat his brother as usual, surrounded by a circle of guards. He jumped, startled when another guard passed by him through the doorway.

That guard hadn’t noticed him, however. He approached the king, striking up a conversation Ocean couldn’t hear. This was probably the best opportunity he was going to get, so Ocean made his way into the palace. He tried to move with confidence as if he belonged, though he dared not meet anyone’s gaze.

The journey to the back doorway wasn’t long. To Ocean, it may as well be a journey to the other side of the world. Every pull forward sapped the air from his lung-sacs. His hands trembled at his sides. Perhaps the guards were scrutinizing him or perhaps not. He couldn’t bear to look at them, risk showing his face.

At last, Ocean found himself in the corridor to the garden. He let out a heavy sigh of relief, could have collapsed there as his nerves screamed for mercy.

There was no choice but to press on and complete his mission. Whether he acted in desperation to escape, desperation to save Solveig, or desperation for his next greenbrite fix was a mystery even to him.

It mattered not as he reached the great door to the garden. Organic bars blocked the way—long, thorny tendrils dangling to the floor. It appeared as if he could push through them like a curtain if he was careful. But as he approached, they began to wriggle in place as if his very presence agitated them.

The last time Ocean tried to break into the garden, these tendrils tangled around him and nearly shredded him to pieces. Each lengthy thorn held a poison that burned his blood like an urchin’s sting. He was not about to experience that twice.

But he hadn’t been prepared then, hadn’t the tools for the job. This time he carried a Terrian knife at his hip. Its iron blade burned his flesh on contact, for he was a magical being, and Solveig explained that her people used iron to ward off evil spells.

These tendrils were beings of pure magic, and with a simple jab, they curled up tightly as a snail’s coiled shell.

Iron was a technology of the Blackoak people. Such a wretched metal was nowhere to be found in Tekee, but as Ocean learned from Solveig, it did not poison humans the way it did the fae.

The tendrils quivered in fear at the top of the doorway, fastened there by a web of clutching roots. Ocean quickly passed under them, finally accessing the place he’d been denied to for so long.

Like the rest of the palace, the garden was dimly-lit by fungus that thrived in the humid globe. It sparkled like stars in the domed ceiling’s blackness high above. In this spacious room was a lush garden of colorful plants and fungi, broad-leafed trees with scaled bark, twisting mushrooms as tall as Ocean was long.

The plants anchored themselves to the floor of sand and rocks, shifting under Ocean as he searched for greenbrite. He threw a glance back at the doorway. The corridor beyond was still clear. Swiftness was key.

Along the path of sand sat heavy pots carved from stone. Each pot housed benign vegetation that helped circulate oxygen through the globe—all but one, a massive pot raised high on a pillar above the others.

This pot was covered by a faceted crystal dome, and inside were glowing, green mushrooms sprouting from the soil. Their stems coiled up to hollow, misshapen caps.

Ocean furrowed his brow at the dome. A symbol was carved in the glass: a circle with teeth around its edges and a slash crossing through it. The Tekeetian symbol for “poison”.

Lifting the dome, Ocean carefully set it aside and plucked a handful of greenbrite, stuffing it in the sharkskin satchel at his hip. Its bright glow remained even after being plucked. Bright Keeper always removed the pods before giving the medicine to Ocean, but here the fleshy little polyps remained tucked under the mushroom’s cap.

The pods could be planted on Redwood’s soil and cultivated with magic, assuming Ocean could get them out of the palace. The mission was far from over.

Head down and moving with haste, he made his exit from the garden. He flinched as he passed someone in the corridor, but it was just a plant tender heading to duty.

“Keeper,” they greeted, briefly raising their right hand. Ocean mumbled a reply and moved on. Now he was slithering through the spacious throne room, bustling with guards and attendants.

He fixated his gaze on the floor and made a beeline for the courtyard. Perhaps if he focused his energy inward, no one would notice him.

Or perhaps not.

“Do you think me so foolish, Brother?” rumbled the clan king. Ocean froze in place just ahead of his throne. The exit was so close. He dared to glance back and saw his brother’s glare boring into him, alongside the dozen or so guards doing the same. Their yellow eyes were like the magical lights of Tekee from afar, equally as familiar and threatening to him.

The king went on, “What have you done with Bright Keeper?”

Ocean couldn’t bring himself to answer. He could hardly accept it himself, even as he stood in the throne room wearing his dead half-brother’s armor.

A long silence passed. The king’s patience wore thin. Finally he ordered, “Guards, seize him!” and a sudden burst of adrenaline surged through Ocean’s veins. He whirled around to face the guards advancing on him with nets drawn, just as slow and clumsy on land as he was.

But Ocean had an advantage that they did not: He wielded the power of light. Fear and desperation willed magic to his hands so quickly, its glowing energy overflowed from his fingertips like water.

Ocean swung his quaking hands around as if shaping a globe of clay. A white light hovered between them, then burst in a brilliant flash when he smashed it on the floor.

The clan king let out a pained shout. His guards staggered back, shielding their eyes. Even as the light dissipated, they were left with spots in their vision, the world beyond refusing to focus.

They would recover soon. But not soon enough, as Ocean was already in the globeholder’s airlock, squeezing through its fleshy vents. There was no _plan_ anymore. Ocean’s mind raced to save this disaster as he lived it, aimlessly speeding towards his cave.

No. He would lead the king straight to Solveig, he realized, so he instead made a sharp turn towards the open waters above Tekee. He heard faint clicks from behind, shouts from the two guards pursuing him. They were quickly closing the gap upon the backs of hippocampi—equine beasts that soared through the water with their powerful, scaly tales.

The beasts had just two legs on their front halves that ended in long flippers. With such anatomy they were like seals; quick and graceful in the water and helpless on land.

Suddenly Ocean knew exactly where he must go. But to make it there, he had to open more space between himself and the guards.

He fumbled with the straps of his armor, carelessly jerking them loose and letting each piece tumble away. All but the belt with the sharkskin satchel and his iron knife were left behind.

Without the armor he felt so quick and agile, but it wasn’t enough. The hippocampi brayed, letting out long croaks as the guards mercilessly tugged their reigns to urge them on.

It was so close to Ocean’s medicine hour. He could tell by the light of the midday sun beaming through the water, but more so by the invisible mites crawling under his flesh, the fatigue aching in his bones, and the nausea churning his stomachs. Still he willed another burst of magic forth, hands shaking so violently that his orb became a formless amoeba.

Sloppily, desperately, he tossed the great light behind him. It exploded between his pursuers, followed by the startled brays of the hippocampi.

The beasts panicked, for they had never even surfaced before, had never seen the light of the sun. Blindly they careened in spirals as their jockeys, equally as blinded, struggled for control.

Ocean pushed on towards the glittering surface. He disappeared inside the white reflection of the sun, following it towards Blackoak Island. The seafloor curved closer and closer still until Ocean was grazing the rocks with his fingertips. Then he breached the waves, desperately scrambling onto the sandy shore.

The water lapped at his dragging tentacles like a desperate, clutching predator trying to pull him back in. Had he lost the guards? They could be waiting for him just under the waves.

They couldn’t follow him to shore, couldn’t surface in the brightness like he could. All his time under Solveig’s false sun had changed his eyes, giving him much clearer vision in the light.

Now Ocean could see, just ahead of him, human shapes coming into focus on the beach. Their shouts were muffled by the water inside him. He flexed a bundle of muscles in his throat to push excess water from his gills. It gushed from his neck and over his shoulders, splashing on the pebbles below him.

Now he could hear their human chatter, and he understood almost every word of it. Four humans stood some distance away, their bare feet braced for impact.

They clutched long fishing spears. Each bone tip was pointed towards Ocean. They must have been male, Ocean thought, for Solveig told him that only males grew hair on their faces.

There was little else to protect them but their beards and strips of hide around their waists. Their legs were wet, as if they’d been wading in the water recently. Ocean opened his mouth to speak, to give them some assurance, but they were shouting over him in a panic.

“It’s a sea-devil!”

“It lunged right for us!”

“Kill it, kill it now!”

“Keep still, I don’t think it can see us!”

But Ocean _could_ see them, clear as his brethren saw eachother in the black abyss of the sea. Their limbs were quaking. Adults, surely, but frightened like small children.

Their brown flesh was peppered with spots like Solveig’s was, and now beginning to glisten with sweat the longer this standoff went on.

Ocean was afraid to move. One of the humans raised his spear high, ready to throw it at the slightest provocation. Their chatter was nervous and incessant. Ocean couldn’t get a word in edgewise, so cautiously, he pulled his right hand off the ground. The humans flinched, falling to abrupt silence.

The cecaelia flinched too. He froze for a second, then slowly lifted his hand into the air. Splaying his webbed fingers, revealing his palm, exposing his empty weapon-hand. Raising this hand was a gesture of peace in Aquaria. It transcended all cultures. But had the gesture found its way to Terria?

The humans exchanged anxious glances. They paused for a long moment. Then, slowly, one of them lowered his spear. He shifted it to his left hand and stuck its point in the pebbles. He too raised his right hand.

Ocean cursed the withdrawal quaking his body. He must have been a pathetic sight. He knew that he must look sickly, but perhaps that would work in his favor.

“I mean you no harm,” he said in their language. In this condition he couldn’t harm them if he tried. The humans jumped when he spoke, clutching their spears tighter. They turned to one another and chattered again.

“It just spoke!”

“Did you hear that?”

“Talk to it!”

“_You_ talk to it!”

After a small conference, one of the humans turned back to the cecaelia and asked, “What do you want, creature?”

What a question, thought Ocean. How could he even begin to explain? His addled, aching head raced with answers. He made his decision, said wearily, “Solveig is in danger. I can save her, but I need help.”

Every one of the humans’ eyes rounded. They murmured her name, whispered to eachother before the first speaker asked, “Solveig’s alive? Where is she?”

“She is there, far below the waves,” replied Ocean, pointing towards the rocky, innocuous little island jutting out of the sea some distance away. “But my people, they mean to kill her and I cannot show my face in the water again. I’m told you have vessels that float on the surface. I can save her, but I must have one to do it.”

The speaker furrowed his hairy brows. “Are you talking about a boat? You want a boat from us?”

“Boats are just a story,” said another.

The third added, “They’re not a story, we had them once! But the elders forbid them ages ago.”

The first speaker stepped forward, knuckles white around his weapon. “What kind of trickery is this, sea-devil? Trying to lure us into the sea?”

“No,” Ocean said quickly, raising his hand again. “I’ve admired your people for a very long time. But I admire Solveig most of all, and I tell you, she will die if she stays in Aquaria. You must help me bring her back to Terria where she belongs.”

The humans spoke amongst themselves. Ocean heard only some of their mutterings.

“…can’t trust a sea-devil…”

“…obviously a trick…”

“…never found her body…”

The first speaker addressed Ocean again. “If you really know Solveig, tell us something about her,” he demanded.

Ocean hesitated. There was much to tell. Where could he start?

“Very well,” he began. “She jumped off the cliffside some weeks ago. She is brazen. She is clever. She fights hard for whatever she wants and she accepts nothing less. She is bold and dramatic. Her smile is as bright as the sun.”

He tipped his head towards the rising sun, wincing in its flare. “She married one called ‘Hemming’.”

At this, the humans’ faces changed. Their aggression seemed to soften. The first speaker turned to another and said, “Go fetch Hemming. Quickly.”

*


	4. On the Waves

##  **[CHAPTER 4: ON THE WAVES]**

One human ran up the forested pathway to the cliff. When he returned to the beach, he brought a dozen other humans in tow, all clad in their clothes of fur and leather and fibers.

They regarded Ocean warily, keeping a safe distance. Only one approached him. He was thin and hunched with age, his beard white as seafoam. He used a wooden staff to balance himself as he stood before Ocean.

He looked the cecaelia up and down, squinting through clouded hazel eyes. “So it’s true,” he creaked.

“It spoke to us! It speaks our language!” called a man, one of the first to see Ocean.

The old man cleared his throat. “I am Yorig, elder of the Blackoak tribe,” he greeted. “And you are…?”

Ocean swallowed back his nausea, tried to steady his tremors as he replied, “I am brother to the clan king of Tekee, offspring of the late king and queen.”

He paused. Creases appeared between the humans’ brows, the same crease Solveig had when she didn’t understand. Quickly he added, “I am called ‘Ocean’.”

The creases disappeared. Yorig said, “Greetings, Ocean. My nephew tells me you are holding one of our people captive. The sunshine girl, the one who was lost to the sea last season. Is it true?”

“Yes,” replied Ocean, “but I don’t wish to harm her. I want only to return her to Terria. Solveig is dear to me as I’m sure she is dear to you.”

The elder shot him a strange expression. “And you’ve come to ask us for a boat?”

“Yes,” Ocean said again. “Please! It’s the only way I can move her without drawing attention from my people. They will kill her on sight!”

“Elder Yorig, this is a trick!” a large man called. “Remember what happened to the—”

But Yorig silenced him with a simple raise of his withered, brown palm. Reluctantly the man closed his mouth.

Yorig turned back to Ocean and said, “You are the first sea-devil I’ve met for myself. But I know your kind well from the legends passed down from my ancestors. I know that you are vicious creatures, that you are territorial of the water-world you call ‘Aquaria’. I also know that the gods blessed you with magic, but only in exchange for all your untruths. You cannot lie to me.”

“No. I cannot,” Ocean replied through his grinding teeth. His fingers twitched, longing to seize the greenbrite at his hip. The elder squinted at him again, looking into his sickly yellow eyes.

“And I see you are not well,” he said.

Ocean shook his head and told him, “I’ve been poisoned by my own people.” He patted the sharkskin satchel. “I have the medicine here, but it will make a monster out of me and I don’t wish to be a danger to you. Please, Elder Yorig, you must make haste to help me! Solveig’s life depends on it!”

Yorig’s gaze drifted down to his feet, wrapped in fiber sandals. He stood silent in thought. The large man from before snatched a spear from one of the fishermen, then charged forward to join the elder’s side.

“Grant him a boat,” said the large man. “I’ll sail out with him, and if he tries anything strange, I’ll drive this spear through his skull.”

The elder glanced up at him. “Do not be rash, Hemming.”

“They have my damned wife!” the large man suddenly shouted, pointing the spear towards the sea. “She’s alive somewhere out there, and gods only know what these sea-devils are doing to her!”

Hemming gave Ocean a shallow jab with the spear, prodding the center of his chest. He snarled at the cecaelia, “I’ll carve a trunk into a boat myself if I have to, but you will take me to Solveig, and you will not harm a hair on her head. Promise me that, creature.”

Ocean gently pushed the spear away. “I promise, I will never harm her,” he said.

*

At last, Ocean swallowed his dose of greenbrite. But not before warning the villagers so that they may ensnare him in a net. Then he became a spectacle, drooling and writhing on the beach while the Blackoak people gawked with wonder.

Meanwhile, Hemming and his friends ventured into the forest to chop wood. Even under Yorig’s direction, they hadn’t the time nor knowledge to make a proper boat like their ancestors used. Instead, they quickly fashioned a raft of logs and strong rope.

Green muck gushed from Ocean’s mouth onto the rocky shore. He tried to swipe the blur from his eyes, but his arm was tangled in the net. He shut all four of his eyelids tightly and opened them again. A sea of human faces surrounded him, all wide eyes and bared teeth.

“I think it’s awake…”

“Look, its eyes are yellow again…”

“It vomited up the medicine,” they chattered.

Ocean tried to gauge the position of the sun, but it was just too bright against his Aquarian eyes. Perhaps a couple hours had passed. He wriggled in the net, trying to free himself. It was hopeless. He had too many limbs, and every one of them was tangled.

When he asked the surrounding villagers for help, his pleas went ignored. None of them had the courage to approach him.

“Please,” he begged. “I’m free of the greenbrite’s hold now. I won’t hurt you!”

Still they hesitated, chattering anxiously to eachother. Ocean remained trapped in the net, squirming and struggling until a familiar face returned from the forest path.

Yorig stopped before the cecaelia. He must have heard Ocean’s pleas, for he swept his staff towards three of the onlookers and ordered, “You three, get him out of that net. Hemming will be here soon.”

Though reluctant, the villagers obeyed. They cautiously kneeled before Ocean and began untangling his limbs. By the time the cecaelia was free, Hemming arrived with his friends.

They carried a hefty raft of logs above their heads. The onlookers marveled at the sight of it, chattering amongst themselves. They watched as Hemming and the others pushed the vessel into the water, then cheered when it floated effortlessly on the waves.

Hemming jumped on top of it, raising his calloused hands victoriously. He’d returned from the forest wearing thin leather garb and the pelt of some animal around his waist. Two leather straps formed an “X” across his chest—one holding his spear, the other attached to a bag.

“Hemming,” Yorig began, “this will be our peoples’ first voyage in decades. I worry for your safety out there on the sea, and I regret that I have no advice to help you. Are you sure you want to do this?”

Hemming scowled at Ocean, looking back at him from the beach. He jabbed a finger at the cecaelia and replied, “Those devils stole my woman from me, Elder Yorig! But this is about more than Solveig. This is about sending a message to these creatures.”

The crags in Yorig’s face deepened. “Do not incite a war,” he warned. “Just bring Solveig back. Should something happen, we will mourn you as we mourned her. Enough tears have been shed already.”

“Yes, I’ll bring her back. And when I do, the devils will know that we’re not just going to lie down and be ravaged! We will take back what’s ours, and we will fight back when wronged.”

Hemming’s gaze shifted to the cecaelia. He gestured to the raft and went on, “Come, devil. Guide me to Solveig then.”

Ocean slithered onto the raft, coiling his tentacles around himself in a spiral. He did not even want to touch the water until it was necessary. The area must have been crawling with his brother’s guards, all frantically searching for him.

The design of the raft was sloppy and misshapen. But that would work to their advantage, he thought, for he knew how it must have looked from beneath the waves. From below, it would look like a great mass of driftwood innocuously bobbing along. It wouldn’t attract a second glance from his people.

One of Hemming’s friends tossed a wooden oar to him. Hemming showed him a grateful nod, then waved one last time to his people. They waved back, wishing him good luck, and he began paddling out to sea.

Several dark boulders jutted out of the water all around the island. Ocean pointed to a particularly tall one and said, “Look there, way out in the distance. Solveig is at the tallest of those stones.”

Hemming queried, “What do you mean? Is she trapped on it?”

“No. She is trapped _inside_ of it,” replied Ocean. “That one there, it’s hollow inside. It’s the cave I’ve called home for a very long time.”

“Where do the rest of your kind live?” asked Hemming.

“They live at the deepest depths, where the waters are calm and dark.”

The man fell silent for a long moment as he rowed the raft onward. The boulder was still a long distance away.

Then he asked, “What else is down there?”

Ocean thought for a moment. Of course Hemming wouldn’t know, for the depths would crush his human body, his human eyes were blind without the sunlight, and his people feared venturing too far, lest the sea-devils pull them down into this unknown abyss.

Ocean answered, “Sand. Rocks. Forests of kelp. Shells by the millions. There are crabs that feast on sunken carcasses from above. There are fish, but they’re unlike the fish at the surface. They’re dark and ugly and, in my opinion, bitter on the tongue. Aside from Tekee, there is nothing of interest down there. Aquaria is a dreary abyss. It changes so slowly, it feels as if nothing changes at all.”

He glanced over at Hemming, added earnestly, “But your world of Terria is full of life. The trees fall when the wind blows, the land deforms when the waves crash, and I’ve watched you Terrians change and adapt to it all. Life on the surface must be bold and exciting. Had I the choice, I’d have been born a human, so that I could thrive in that world myself.”

He saw the man’s mouth stretch behind his beard. It was something like a smile, but it didn’t feel warm like Solveig’s smile. Hemming replied, “It’s _exciting_ alright. Never thought I’d see my wife leap off a cliff, or row a boat out to sea, or have a conversation with a sea-devil…” He shook his head. “I knew that woman was trouble. But you know, that’s what drew me to her.”

“You’re courageous. You must care a lot for Solveig,” said Ocean.

Hemming chuckled softly. “Of course I do. And after all this, I know she’ll finally feel the same about me.”

He paused. Staring out to the horizon, he added, “My parents paid her family a handsome dowry and she still didn’t want to marry me. She fought me like an animal on our wedding night. But women are like that, you know. They’re like wild beasts. You need to put in the effort to tame them, and then they learn their place.”

The man sighed, briefly raking his hand through his long, dark hair. Then he turned to Ocean and said, “I don’t know what Solveig told you about me. She’s a wild, crazy woman. You can’t trust what she says. Did she mention me at all?”

Ocean hesitated. He could certainly tell the blunt, honest truth. But if things went awry and Solveig ended up back in Hemming’s arms, Ocean had a feeling the man would punish her for it. Lies were foreign to Ocean. He wasn’t good at identifying them.

But he did know how to bend the truth just before its breaking point. He knew well the power of omission. So after a moment of thought, he answered carefully, “She said she was unhappy with you the night she jumped off the cliffside.”

The vague answer seemed good enough for Hemming, who was quick to say, “Yes, she was, but it was no fault of mine! She’s been hysterical since the day I met her. She yells about everything! No matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, everything I do is wrong. She was unhappy with me that day, but she was unhappy with me _every_ day. I…”

Hemming paused, swiping at his neck. “…I didn’t think she’d actually jump. She always said she was going to cut her throat or hang herself from a tree, but she never did it. She’d say those things to upset me because she’s wicked.”

Ocean’s gaze drifted over the surface of the water. Waves rolled beneath them, shallow and gentle in the easy weather. Puffy white clouds floated through the blue sky above.

“If she made you so miserable,” began Ocean, “why did you stay with her?”

Hemming shook his head, expression hardening. “I’m no quitter,” he said sharply, “and I’ll be damned before I’m bested by a woman. I know I can make her into a good wife. It just takes time, that’s what my father said. I only knew my mother as a good woman, but he says she used to be like Solveig; wild and brazen.”

The cecaelia’s stomachs sank. His twin hearts thumped, pushing hot, furious blood through his veins. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask why Hemming didn’t just let the poor woman go, how he could be so stubborn and cruel to force her into submission, why he didn’t once consider her feelings…

He knew that if the first word passed his lips, the rest would follow ever louder. His tone would escape him, the volatile man might attack, and all this effort would be for nothing. For Solveig’s sake and his own, Ocean bit his tongue for the rest of the journey to the cave.

*

The raft’s edge touched the surface of the tallest boulder. The stone was smooth and glistening, worn from millennia upon millennia of crashing waves. Hemming picked up one of the long fibers attached to the raft, looping it around a smaller rock nearby. It held the raft in place as he and Ocean discussed their next move.

Ocean told him, “The only way inside is underwater. There is a fault in the stone near the seafloor. Dive down with me and I’ll use my magic to protect you from the pressure. You will breathe as freely as you do on land.”

Hemming met him with a sharp glare. “Prove to me that this isn’t a trick,” he demanded.

“I’m a fae creature. I cannot lie to you,” said Ocean. “That is my proof.”

Silent for a moment, Hemming then asked, “Solveig is really in this cave?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll take me down there to rescue her? No tricks?”

“I promise.”

The man took a deep breath, settling the subtle quake in his hands. “Alright. Let’s go,” he said. He took off his shoes, then shrugged off his shirt and bag before jumping into the water. Ocean followed just behind.

Ocean’s transparent set of eyelids slid over his eyes, and quickly they readjusted to the familiar murk of the water. Hemming struggled to open his own, squinting back at the cecaelia.

They opened wide when Ocean began blowing a bubble from his mouth, like saliva from a sick babe.

It grew ever bigger in size. Then Ocean plucked it from his lips and pushed it onto Hemming’s head. All the water that once surrounded the man’s face gushed away. Struck by the sudden weightlessness of air, he gasped, surprised when water didn’t fill his lungs.

He reached up to touch the bubble. It wasn’t as delicate as he imagined, but it was still pliable and slick like frog’s flesh. So Ocean had kept his promise so far, he thought. The cecaelia pointed downwards to the seafloor, but all Hemming could see through his human eyes was a black void.

Ocean took his wrist and pulled the man down to the depths where the sunlight couldn’t penetrate, where its warmth couldn’t reach. These depths were cold and blacker than night on the surface, with no moon and stars to light up the sky. Hemming couldn’t see a thing. He began to panic, thrashing in Ocean’s grip.

He reached for his spear, struggling to pull it loose from its harness. By the time he did, he suddenly surfaced. The bubble around his head disappeared in a burst of mist. He blinked his eyes and quickly shoved the wet hair out of his face. Now he could see a black space with a bright, shimmering night sky above.

Ocean pulled Hemming to the stony, slimy shore. The man slowly rose to his bare feet, looking around at his alien surroundings. He realized that the starry sky was not a sky at all. It was a cavernous ceiling covered in glowing fungus—the top of the rock they saw on the surface. Their raft must have been floating just outside the wall.

Hemming cautiously followed Ocean to the back of the cave. He recoiled when they passed the corpse of another cecaelia, but decided not to question it. He could see a figure just ahead, a woman lying upon a flat boulder. She was dressed in bloody rags, her dark hair pulled into a long, messy braid.

Her back was turned to them and her body was still. She was either sleeping or dead.

“Solveig!” Hemming cried, his bold voice echoing through the cave. The woman jumped in surprise, scrambling upright. By the time she turned around, the man was already upon her, clutching her by the arms.

Solveig saw the face of Hemming, stunned for a brief moment. She let out a piercing, ragged screech and struggled pathetically in his grip. She appeared pale and sickly, bruised, malnourished, perhaps days from death…

“Don’t be afraid,” Hemming told her, brushing a stray lock from her eyes. “It’s me! It’s just me. I’m here to bring you home, my love.”

Solveig stared back at him through wide, hazel eyes. She gasped, “You’re not real! I know you’re not. It’s not true, it’s not you!”

A twisted smile slowly spread across her lips. Her eyes were unblinking as she began to laugh. It was a hoarse and terrible sound. Hemming turned back to Ocean, who was slowly slithering towards them.

“She’s very sick,” said Ocean.

Hemming barked, “I see that! We need to get her out of here immediately!”

Reaching out with empty hands, Ocean replied, “Let me take her then. I’ll bring her to the raft just as I brought you here.”

Hemming hesitated for a long moment. With little choice, he surrendered the woman to Ocean. She squirmed and chattered deliriously, swinging her fists all around. Ocean swiftly used his tentacles to restrain her.

“Then you’ll come back for me, won’t you?” asked Hemming.

Ocean bared his jagged teeth, smiling like a human. “Yes. I’ll bring you out of the cave next, I promise.”

Satisfied, Hemming’s shoulders relaxed a little as Ocean dragged Solveig into the water. What happened after that, Hemming couldn’t tell. He waited there silently in the cave. After a while, he dared to step towards the cecaelia corpse lying near the water’s edge.

The creature looked almost exactly like Ocean. He then jerked, startled by the splash in the water. Ocean’s head and shoulders rose up to greet him.

Water gushed from the cecaelia’s nostrils and the gills on his throat before he spoke, “I’m back. Were you anxious?”

A tiny smile of relief crossed Hemming’s lips. “Of course not. I’m no fool—you promised you’d return for me,” he said. Ocean offered a hand and he did not hesitate to take it. Hemming found himself being dragged into the cold, black water once again.

*

Solveig lie on the raft in a daze. The sudden burst of sunlight left her blind, the fresh breeze foreign yet familiar to her lungs.

Slowly she cracked her eyelids open. She saw blue above and all around. She heard the roar of the waves and the water’s splash against the boulder. Her eyes followed the braided fiber rope from the raft to a nearby rock. It was tethered there while Ocean returned for Hemming.

When the sunlight touched her skin, it was as if clarity came flooding back to Solveig like the high tide. Suddenly the world felt more real, time moving forward once more. She filled her lungs with fresh, salty air. It seemed to bring life to her veins and color to her soul.

She found a bag lying on the raft next to an oar. The bag was unmistakably Hemming’s. She ripped open its flap and frantically dug through it. She found dried meat, berries, a canteen of water, and dry clothing. No knife. She cursed under her breath.

Ocean had betrayed her. He brought Hemming back to torment her, and now they were surely on their way to Blackoak Island! Solveig wouldn’t stand for it. She’d kill them both, she decided, and then row herself to Redwood Island on the horizon. She could see it from here, a tiny black lump sitting across miles of waves.

She grunted as she lifted the oar, heavy in her frail arms. Standing on the raft, she watched the water closely, waiting for their return. She’d crash the solid paddle down on their skulls—first Hemming, then Ocean. Bright Keeper went down easily enough, she reasoned. She was sure she could make quick work of them too.

Solveig watched the side of the raft which Ocean disappeared. She expected him to surface there again, but he had seen her from underwater, brandishing the oar. He knew she was suffering from fear and delirium. He circled the raft and surfaced behind her instead.

Ocean grabbed the edge of the raft, tilting it sideways. Immediately Solveig lost her balance. She toppled to the side with a grunt, losing her grip on the oar. Ocean quickly snatched it away with one of his tentacles and climbed onto the raft.

“Traitor! You damn traitor!” the woman screamed, clumsily getting back to her feet. She swung her fists at the cecaelia, kicking and biting any part of him she could reach. Ocean restrained her with little effort, pushing her back down to her knees.

“I haven’t betrayed you,” Ocean assured her. His voice was hoarse, posture slumped. “We have the boat, we have the greenbrite, and only by the grace of the gods we’ve made it this far. Now we are going to Redwood Island.”

Solveig fell silent, watching as he unhitched the raft from the rock.

She asked, “Where is that bastard Hemming? You promised you’d go back for him!”

“I promised I would bring him out of the cave,” Ocean clarified. “I never said I would bring him with us, bring him home, or even bring him to the surface.”

With that, Ocean transferred the oar to his hands and began to row. His exhausted gaze stuck to the island ahead, so close and so far away. Perhaps if he kept his eyes on it, he thought, he may pull himself into a trance. He may forget the ache in his body and the anxiety in his guts.

The water around them was infested with sharks. Even more fearsome, it was infested with angry Tekeetians. It wouldn’t be long before they discovered Hemming’s body drifting near the cave. He could only hope they didn’t suspect his raft, that the sunshine would discourage them from surfacing, would blind them so they’d never find him again.

After today, he didn’t intend to touch the sea again. If he made it to Redwood Island alive, he would live as a Terrian forever. He already adapted to their language, their light, and their strange ways of expressing themselves. In the eyes of his kind, he may as well grow legs, for he was no longer one of them.

Ocean felt something wrap around his waist. Solveig had thrown herself against him, embracing him as tightly as her frail arms would allow.

“Thank you,” she whispered. It was barely audible over the waves.

The cecaelia longed to reach down and stroke her hair, to comfort her in some way, but he hadn’t the courage the stop rowing. The sooner they reached Redwood Island, the better. He simply embraced her with two of his tentacles as he moved them forward over the sea.

Something pulled at the corners of his aqua lips. The cecaelia smiled like a human, so naturally that he hardly noticed at all.

*

The journey to Redwood Island would take well over a full day. Ocean measured the time in greenbrite doses, of which it would take 3. He felt at ease with the 14 doses in his sharkskin satchel, plus the pods he would need to cultivate more later.

Solveig changed out of her wet rags and into Hemming’s spare clothes. She ate some of the food in his pack, drank some of the water, and offered the rest to Ocean. Ocean declined. He wasn’t willing to stop rowing for anything until they arrived on Redwood’s shore.

The evening sun was harsh on his Aquarian skin. Every few minutes, Solveig splashed sea water over him to keep him hydrated. Now sunset was approaching, the light retreating behind the cloudy horizon, and the air became cool. The sky darkened to star-peppered violet, fading to brilliant gold towards the sun.

Solveig curled up on the other end of the raft, maintaining its balance. Before long she drifted into a much-needed sleep. Ocean transferred the oar to his tentacles hours ago, for the muscles in his arms burned.

His tentacles hadn’t nearly the dexterity of his arms, but he had little choice but to use them now. The greenbrite withdrawals were creeping in, only adding to his misery. It was time for his next dose.

Ocean looked towards Solveig, asleep on the raft. He would need to ensnare himself in the net to keep her safe. But to his horror, he realized he’d forgotten the net on Blackoak’s beach. In all his exhaustion, in his medicinal stupor, in his haste, it had completely slipped his mind.

What to do? He stopped rowing briefly, lost in his frantic thoughts. The single rope would not hold him, he had too many limbs. Throwing himself into these open waters was not an option either, for he would quickly attract predators or Tekeetians.

The only thing to do, he supposed, was to keep rowing. So the cecaelia pushed on through the first stage of withdrawals, stubbornly resisting the tremble in his limbs and the ache in his head.

Before long, a burning sensation tainted his veins. It spread from his head to the ends of his tentacles, as if his blood simmered over a flame.

Ocean’s twitchy fingers kept moving towards the satchel. He jerked them away again and again. The burning in his blood boiled hotter, the ache in his head pounding, and he found his twitchy fingers fumbling with the satchel again. He opened the flap and dug inside, plucking out a green mushroom.

It glowed brilliantly in his palm, such a vibrant green that only magic could be responsible for. Ocean closed his fingers around it, forcing himself to look away. His stomachs churned. The quaking in his hands spread up his arms, his torso, his head, made his jagged teeth chatter.

He felt miserable, and this was still just the beginning. There was so much more to come. He looked back towards Solveig, asleep and none the wiser. He looked to Redwood Island ahead, beckoning him to its shores. Then he looked back to the drug in his hand, promising to take all his suffering away.

His brother oppressed him still, even as he sailed away from Tekee, never to return. He’d come too far, Ocean decided, to throw everything away for the sake of his own comfort.

Perhaps he would die if he didn’t take his medicine. He wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, for he’d never missed a dose before. But if he couldn’t make it to Redwood Island, he could at least ensure that one of them did.

Ocean put the mushroom back in the satchel. Then he slipped the belt off, satchel and all, clutching it tightly in his hand. Part of him resisted, screaming at him to reconsider. But that part of him was like an ugly, cancerous tumor. It threatened to bind him to Tekee and Aquaria forever.

Spinning the satchel around and around on its belt, Ocean loosened his grip and let momentum carry it through the air. It flew like the gulls, then disappeared into the sea with a distant splash.

There was no turning back now. Ocean had damned himself to this plan, so he began rowing again to see it through.

*

Ocean rowed through the night as Solveig slept peacefully. He felt further from peace than he’d ever been. His stomachs cramped painfully, desperate for greenbrite. Ocean doubled over to spew acid into the sea every so often, yet he dutifully kept rowing the raft along.

It was getting harder to do so with the terrible quake in his limbs. Just keeping a hold on the oar had become a challenge. Hours passed and everything just continued to get worse. Sunrise would come soon, and then two doses would pass him by.

By the time the sun’s first rays gleamed on the horizon, Ocean could row no more. He spewed into the water again, the force of it nearly sending him toppling over the edge. He crept back to the center of the raft and curled into a miserable, convulsing ball.

He clutched the oar uselessly in two of his tentacles. It clattered against the logs with his violent convulsions, and the sound of it woke Solveig from her deep slumber. She crawled towards the cecaelia, frantically examining him.

“Ocean,” she gasped, “what’s happening? What’s wrong?”

The cecaelia croaked through gnashed teeth, “Greenbrite…”

“Take some then, qui—” Solveig stopped herself. She briefly glanced around and realized the predicament they were in. “I see. You can’t,” she sighed.

Nothing more needed to be said. The woman stood and pulled the oar out of Ocean’s grip. With renewed strength, she began to row them ever closer to Redwood Island.

Its silhouette was getting larger, and as the sun rose higher, she could see the textures of its trees and crags.

Solveig winced as Ocean retched behind her. She could hear him flopping and thrashing against the wood. He clawed at the bark as he let out long, agonized groans of pain, of misery, of regret.

“Just hold on,” Solveig told him. “Be strong, Ocean. We’re so close. Just hold on…”

The cecaelia couldn’t even speak back to her. As he rolled and writhed, he could think only of slapping her into the sea and fleeing back to his brother. Perhaps if he said sorry, perhaps if he pleaded and looked pathetic enough…

His desire for freedom shut down such thoughts, over and over, as the hours passed. Solveig stopped only briefly to eat, to drink, and to relieve herself. Now the last of the food and water was gone. Making haste was no longer an option—it was necessary if they were to survive.

Solveig powered through her aches and fatigue, her weakness and her terrible cough. She pressed her teeth together tightly, certain she couldn’t row for even one more minute. Then the minute passed, and another, until the quivering strain on her body claimed her.

Her vision blurred. Solveig wobbled, staggering back. Immediately she tripped over one of Ocean’s tentacles and fell over top of him. The cecaelia hardly noticed her weight, for his violent spasms had died into a dizzying stupor. He was hardly aware of his surroundings, his past, nor was he concerned about his future.

All he knew was the incessant nausea cramping his empty stomachs, the debilitating ache pulsing through his body, and a longing for all this suffering to end.

But he could not take his own life now, even if he tried. The pain had immobilized him completely. Now he was left to lie there with Solveig on the raft, drifting aimlessly over the sea.

Solveig took a long moment to catch her breath. She wheezed as she tried to sit up, only for her arms to give out immediately. She fell back onto Ocean and the world twirled around her again. She closed her eyes, trying to will the spins away.

When she opened them again, she glimpsed a crescent-shaped figure shoot up from the water and splash back down. She blinked, furrowing her brow. Was her exhausted mind playing tricks on her? No, for the figure returned, and she realized that it was a dolphin leaping to and fro.

She had seen these creatures in the distance from Blackoak Island. She had seen their gray corpses wash up on the beach, deformed with bloat and rot. But she had never seen a live dolphin so close as it approached the raft, squeaking and squealing. She spotted the dorsal fins of two others rise and fall, then they too began to leap in graceful arcs.

Solveig shook Ocean’s shoulder. “Look,” she wheezed. “Ocean, look! Dolphins! They’re—” She broke down into a coughing fit, muffling her mouth with her arm so not to scare the creatures. If the fables and legends she knew were true, then dolphins were benevolent spirits.

She tried to rouse the cecaelia again, but he lie still and rigid, his eyes rolled back in his twitching head. She wondered if he was dying. The dolphins circled the raft, occasionally leaping from the water. Solveig dared to reach her hand in and splash the water over Ocean’s skin.

She gasped when a dolphin surfaced beneath her palm. It seemed to smile as it clicked and squealed, twirling around playfully in a circle. The creature brought a delighted grin to Solveig’s face. Its skin, she discovered, was flawlessly smooth much like Ocean’s.

She cried out, nearly fell forward as one of the dolphins bumped the raft. The others swam in an artful formation towards one side. The first snagged the hitching rope, and Solveig fell on her back as the raft suddenly sped forward. One dolphin pulled the vessel along while the others pushed it from the back.

They were heading straight for Redwood Island. How did the dolphins know? Solveig was left speechless. Perhaps sun madness had taken her.

Or perhaps the old legend of the voyagers was true after all.

*


	5. Greenbrain

##  ** [CHAPTER 5: GREENBRAIN]**

Solveig could see it now in all its tremendous, imposing glory: Redwood Island. It was not as she imagined in her head, but then again, she wasn’t sure what she expected at all.

The trees on this island dwarfed those in Blackoak three times over. Each one pierced the cloudy sky, their trunks massive enough to hold a small village inside.

Solveig was taken aback by the sight. She gawked up at the seemingly endless treetops, mouth agape in disbelief. The dolphins leaped joyfully through the deeper waters behind her. Now she floated on the shallow, pebbly shore. Turning back to the dolphins, she whistled and waved with tears in her eyes.

The creatures seemed to squeal back at her, then all at once, they disappeared into the sea.

Solveig tried to drag the raft further onto shore. It was much too heavy, so she simply looped its hitching rope around a stone. High tide would surely bring it in later. Glancing at the sunlight through the layer of clouds, she thought it must have been early in the afternoon. The dolphins moved the raft along much faster than an oar ever could.

Perhaps she couldn’t move the raft, but Solveig felt she had to get Ocean away from the sea at all costs. She managed to drag him off the raft and partially onto the shore, but she had quickly worn herself out. She stopped to catch her breath. He weighed as much as two men.

She tried to awaken him again and said, “Ocean, we’re here! We’re on Redwood Island! You have to get up. Please. Come on…”

Ocean responded with nothing but a delayed, laborious groan. It was as if every bit of his strength was drained away, leaving him boneless. Solveig tried to drag him again. It was no use. She sat on the shore and pondered for some time, massaging her aching head.

She couldn’t idle for long. She knew nothing about this new place except what the legends told her. It was supposed to be a bountiful island with plenty of resources for the taking. But first, she had to find where those resources lie.

She perked her head up, hearing another voice. Ocean croaked, “Sol…”

Solveig crawled towards him, leaning her ear to his face. The cecaelia went on as if lifting a boulder with each word, “Body…dies…head…survives…”

Furrowing her brow in confusion, Solveig stared at him for a moment. Then she gasped as the realization hit her.

She stood up, looking all around for something sharp. The beach was littered with broken shells. She quickly picked through them, wincing as they stabbed her feet. None were anywhere near large enough to get the job done.

Her gaze drifted back to the raft. Specifically, to the oar lying across it. It was a product of shoddy, hasty craftsmanship, splintery and sharp at its end. But that would only work to her advantage. She picked up the weighty thing and looked back at Ocean, lying still on the shore.

She gathered his mane of minor tentacles and lie them above his head. Then she sunk her teeth into her lip as she carefully, so very carefully, lined up the paddle with his throat. If she missed by even a tiny bit, she would bash his skull and kill him.

Solveig braced herself on the loose pebbles below, digging her feet beneath them into the sand. She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slow, raising the oar.

Her frail arms trembled under its weight. She could not allow it, so she drew strength from her heart into her muscles just as Ocean drew magic from his brain.

Then, she cried out when she brought the oar down with all her might.

Her eyes rounded. The edge cut half-way through his throat, stopped only by his vertebrae. Just one more chop would do it, she thought, and raised the oar again.

When she did, a vibrant, green ooze suddenly gushed from the wound. Solveig hesitated, watching in horror and awe, as two thin, green tendrils reached out.

They grasped helplessly at Ocean’s throat, as if trying to mend the wound. Solveig wouldn’t allow it. With another raspy cry, she chopped the oar straight through his neck and the green tendrils at once.

When she lifted the oar away, several more tendrils reached out from Ocean’s severed head. They were the same sickly, glowing hue as the greenbrite he always spewed up. This was not part of him, she realized. This was some kind of parasite.

Solveig dropped to her knees and grasped the tendrils. They quickly coiled around her wrist. She tugged, but whatever lie within his head did not want to let him go. She planted her opposite hand on Ocean’s forehead and grunted as she yanked the tendrils.

The thing came free with a gush of repulsive ooze. Solveig fell backwards. Now it was clutching her arm, a creature the likes of which she’d never seen.

Perhaps like a jellyfish in structure, but with a hideous mouth full of tiny, hook-like teeth on the top of its bell. It lacked eyes or any other details to its form, like a green glob of mucus with twelve wriggling little tendrils.

It was small enough to fit in Solveig’s palm, yet so utterly repulsive that she shrieked in terror and flailed her arm. It lost its grip then and hit the pebbles with a splattering sound.

Quickly Solveig scrambled back to her feet and reached for the oar. The parasite writhed helplessly on the shore, reaching out towards Ocean lying close by.

Solveig smacked the wretched thing with the oar. Its reaching tendrils suddenly coiled up to its body. When she drew the paddle away, she found its body flattened, yet still it twitched. She hit the miserable thing five more times, well after it had fallen still, and then threw an armful of stones over it for good measure.

Dropping to her knees beside Ocean, Solveig stopped to catch her breath again. The tide would come to claim the mysterious parasite’s corpse eventually. Until then, she gathered the cecaelia’s severed head and took him with her into the great redwood forest.

*

Solveig felt a raindrop on her shoulder. It was time to retreat into the cave.

After what she’d been through, a cave was the last place she wanted to be now. But it was the closest shelter she could find to stay out of the cold, so she dropped her collection of dry wood there at its gaping mouth.

Lying nearby was a collection of other materials she’d gathered. She used them to build a fire, patiently spinning the end of a stick against dry grass.

She hoped Ocean would make it through the night. She left his head in a freshwater pond not far from the cave. When the rain stopped, she would check on him again.

Solveig plucked large, waxy leaves from a bush and folded them into bowls, then placed them out in the rain. When they filled, she drank the water and set them out again.

Tomorrow she would search for a better source of water and gather the tubers she saw growing in the forest. They looked like the same which grew on Blackoak, and the rodents and birds she’d seen were not much different either.

She could build a life here, she thought, but she was determined to make Ocean part of it. She never would have made it if not for him.

Many times she was sure he’d betray her. Every time, he proved her wrong. Many times she thought she’d give in to death. Every time, she proved herself wrong. Perhaps she’d proved Hemming wrong too. He always said her bold, stubborn nature would be the end of her.

Yet here she was, very much alive while his own desire to oppress her had destroyed him. Now his corpse was lost at sea, as her own would be if it weren’t for Ocean’s promise.

The sea had swallowed every Blackoak villager that tried to cross it in the past, but it seemed to part for Solveig, cutting a path straight to paradise. Maybe fate wasn’t so cruel to her after all.

Solveig fell asleep in the warmth of her fire. She tossed more wood on it when she awoke in the morning, then headed for the pond. It was swollen from the rain, its water extending beyond its bounds. The woman rolled up her pants and waded in, searching for Ocean’s head.

Finally she felt his smooth, rubbery skin and pulled him up. Curiously, it seemed a stalk of flesh had grown from his neck overnight. She decided to leave it be and greeted, “Good morning, Ocean. Are you still with me?”

Slowly, the cecaelia’s eyes opened out of tandem. He looked at her for a short moment, then closed them again. Solveig let out a sigh of relief. She placed him back in the water and headed deeper into the woods to forage.

The sunlight on her skin felt invigorating. For every moment she spent in its light, she seemed to grow stronger. In time, she had an armful of tubers. She left them in the cave and then scouted the area for running water. The stagnant, green pond water just wouldn’t do.

She discovered a small, trickling waterfall running down a rocky face of the cave. What lie at the top of the towering peak was a discovery for another day. She filled her canteen and returned to check on Ocean one more time before she retired for the night.

The cecaelia responded with his eyes again.

The next day, the stalk in his throat had grown in size.

The day after, fleshy little branches had grown from it, each one reaching upwards.

The day after that, the branches had grown longer, clutching his jaw.

By the fifth day, the branches spread all over his face, clinging to his skin.

By the sixth, they spread into webs of thin membranes like spiderwebs.

By the end of the week, Ocean’s entire head was consumed by a layer of thin, aqua flesh. The stalk growing from his throat had turned into some kind of sac, only growing larger with each day.

By their eighth day on the island, Ocean’s head was completely consumed by the strange sac, as if he had become some kind of egg. Twice each day, Solveig tended to it, rain or shine.

She wiped away the algae that tried to claim its surface. She spoke to him to keep him company, telling him about all she’d accomplished that day, whether he could hear her or not.

And Solveig had accomplished much in that week, securing basic necessities and scouting all around the area. She saw no sign of other humans so far. But Redwood Island was much larger than Blackoak, and the journey to its opposite shore was a journey she couldn’t make alone.

*

Solveig scratched another tally mark into the side of the cave. Twenty days had passed since she set foot on the island. Three rabbit pelts and cuts of meat were strung up to dry nearby. She had skewered frogs she caught from the pond and cooked them over the fire. Everywhere she looked, there were berries, nuts, and vegetables to be harvested.

Redwood Island truly was the land of plenty. Solveig felt strong now, with color in her skin and bounce in her step. Her terrible cough was nearly gone. Her time in Aquaria seemed like nothing but a bad dream. Her time in Blackoak seemed like a distant memory, blurred by decades of time, though less than a month had passed.

She did not want to remember. She only wanted to know her new chapter in Redwood, where her life should have begun in the first place.

The summer sun was shining brightly in the clear, blue sky. Solveig stepped out of the cave to gather mussels from the beach. But when she looked out on the horizon, she saw a colossal plume of smoke rising. It tapered down to the tiny silhouette of Blackoak Island.

She’d never seen so much smoke in her life. It stretched across the sky, black and ominous. What kind of disaster was plaguing her native land?

She wasn’t about to sail back and find out. She frowned at the raft, sitting on the shore. Solveig was sure, in some way, that this disaster stemmed from the day she leaped off the cliffside. Her choices escalated to what she could only assume was war.

She turned away from the sea and tried not to think about it. She’d left that life far, far behind. But when the sun fell and darkness covered the sky, she saw a red glow rising from the sea. Its light spilled out like blood on the waves.

All of Blackoak Island must be burning to ashes, she realized, for the fire was so bright and the smoke was relentless. It burned her throat even from a world away.

The fire raged for days, and then weeks. Gradually it died down and the smoke blew away with the breeze. Solveig could no longer see Blackoak’s silhouette. Its tallest conifers had turned to ash, wiping Blackoak village out of sight and out of mind.

Now it truly was just a distant memory. There was no going back.

*

Ocean’s strange “egg” was too heavy to move. It had grown so large that its top jutted from the pond, which had been slowly evaporating in the summer heat.

Solveig tended to it each hour, splashing water over every inch to keep it hydrated. She built a simple structure of wooden poles and leaves to shield it from the sun.

All the while, she continued to speak to the silent egg as if it were another person. For all she knew, Ocean had died in there long ago and she was wasting her time. Only hope and curiosity drove her efforts now.

The weeks passed, and so too did the dry season. The temperature was beginning to drop. Solveig anxiously tended Ocean’s egg, wondering if he would survive the cold season to come. What if the pond froze solid?

She needn’t worry anymore, for one rainy day, the egg began to twitch. Solveig staggered away from it, shielding herself from the rain with a large, waxy leaf. She held it above her head and watched as the fleshy sac suddenly burst open with a gush of water.

A clawed hand with webbed fingers reached out of the wound, grasped the membrane and peeled it away. It was tossed carelessly into the pond.

Solveig shrieked with delight when she saw her cecaelian friend alive and well. Perhaps it was just the passage of time clouding her memory, but she swore he looked healthier.

His once scrawny frame was filled out and well-muscled, his hunched posture straightened, all his nicks and scars nowhere to be seen. His aqua-green flesh seemed more vibrant now, even in the dreary weather. Solveig tossed the leaf aside and carelessly splashed through the pond.

“You’re alive! Oh, I knew it! Thank the gods!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. Ocean blinked several times, looking all around. He seemed dazed.

Still he returned her embrace, lips stretching into a wide, toothy grin as he told her, “You shouldn’t be out in the cold, my friend.”

Solveig wiped the tears from her eyes, though the rain quickly wet her face again. “It’s okay,” she said, “I have a change of clothes at home. Did you know I skinned a deer all on my own?”

“Yes, so you said.”

Solveig’s eyes rounded. “Then you _could_ hear me!”

“Every word of it,” Ocean assured her. He looked up at the rain, pouring heavier by the second. Solveig took his hand and tried to help him out of the pond. He kept dropping down, struggling as if slipping in mud.

“What’s wrong?” queried Solveig.

“I…I’m not sure,” replied Ocean, reaching down into the murky, green water. He felt around for a moment.

Then his hairless brows shot up and he suddenly recoiled, falling backwards into the pond. Solveig shielded her eyes from the splash.

“Ocean!” she called, reaching blindly for him. He resurfaced quickly, clearly in a panic as he scrambled his way up the muddy shore with his arms. He stared down at his body in awe, as silent and slack-jawed as Solveig. Two of his eight tentacles were missing.

But in their place were none other than two long legs. They bent at the knee and ankle just like Solveig’s, but the foot was very unlike hers. It had just two clawed toes with a web of flesh between them. Ocean stared at his new appendages, stunned for a long moment.

“You…” Solveig began slowly, “you have legs.”

Ocean swallowed the knot in his throat. “I guess I do,” he croaked. Moving his tentacles came easily and naturally. He moved each one separately in a clockwise direction, then tried to move one of his legs.

It was not at all the same. His tentacles were boneless, graceful, could coil up and stretch out like string. By comparison, his leg felt clumsy and stiff. He moved his thigh left and right, everything below his knee dragging along. He concentrated harder to feel out new muscles, and then his ankle bent up and down.

He could bend his toes, though they were shorter and clumsier than his fingers. His legs shared the same range of limited movement as his arms. This felt very strange to Ocean, as if he had a second pair of arms stretching out of his abdomen.

But wasn’t this what he always wished for? Had the gods finally taken pity on him? Or perhaps they were rewarding him for his courage? No matter the cause, this was his reality now.

He had done the impossible. At last, he was a Terrian.

Ocean quickly discovered that walking was a world away from slithering. Just standing upon two feet was difficult. He pressed his tentacles on the ground to steady himself. Then cautiously, he took his first steps. His knees knocked, he wobbled to and fro, and then he splashed into the mud over and over as the rain poured down.

“Please, just go inside,” he begged Solveig. “There’s no need to stand in the rain and watch me humiliate myself all day.”

Solveig regarded him with a warm smile, swiping the wet locks from her face. She took his hands and helped him to his new feet once more. “Just try again,” she said.

Little by little, step by step, Ocean made his way to the giant maw of the cave. The fire crackled softly inside, nearly dead. Solveig rushed to toss more wood on it while Ocean dropped to his knees before the flames. He was transfixed by their beauty, squinting at the heat on his face.

“I’ve never seen fire this close before,” he said. He raised a cautious palm towards it, but Solveig seized his wrist.

“It’s _very_ hot,” she warned. “Trust me, you don’t ever want to touch it.”

Ocean watched as Solveig pierced meat and vegetables on a skewer and roasted them over the flames. For the first time in his long life, Ocean tasted warm, cooked food.

“Do you like it?” Solveig asked.

The cecaelia closed his eyes as he chewed a second bite. He said, “I’ve been eating food all wrong my entire life.”

Solveig giggled, preparing another skewer for him.

That night, Solveig slept in the cave while Ocean retired back to the pond. A full evening of practice made him mobile enough. Tomorrow, he hoped to master control of his legs even more.

*

Once Ocean learned how to walk, Solveig decided the next logical step was to teach him how to dance. Seven days passed since he hatched into his new form. Now he found himself hand-in-hand with Solveig, jumping up and down to the rhythm of her voice.

The sky was clear and the air was brisk. Steam gusted from Solveig’s mouth each time she cried out, singing a lively, traditional Blackoak song.

She and Ocean jumped together: low, low, low, then high. Upon their high jumps, they clapped their hands above their heads, then spun once before joining hands again.

The joy in their hearts swelled so heavily that it overflowed as laughter. The two toppled onto the grass, giggling far too much to continue.

Ocean’s sickness hadn’t returned yet, nor his longing for greenbrite. Now when he thought of the greenbrite, his guts rolled with repulsion rather than withdrawal. After so many long centuries, he truly escaped the clan king’s grasp.

Now he was free to go wherever he pleased. When the cold seasons passed and the rainy season arrived once again, he chose to go on an adventure with Solveig.

They decided to cross the island together and see what was on the other side. The journey would take a full day or more, and they had no idea what kind of dangers may lie in the distant forests.

There were no roads carved for them, only the narrow, vague pathways which the small native deer had made. Ocean led the way, pushing foliage aside with his tentacles. His skin was a little tougher than Solveig’s, resisting the scratches and scrapes of little branches.

Along the way they encountered rabbits, deer, birds, and rodents. Solveig shot at them with her shoddy bow and arrow, but as usual, walked away with nothing to show for it. It was her clever traps that ensnared most of their meals.

The rainy season was unpredictable. Though the sun gleamed all morning, clouds suddenly rolled in by the afternoon. Solveig and Ocean took shelter in a nearby cave as a heavy torrent of rain began to pour. Ocean needed no such shelter, but he knew it was important for humans to stay dry when it was cold.

Solveig tried sparking a flame until the rain passed. Her efforts were not appreciated, for she heard a loud, raspy growl from deeper inside the cave.

Ocean’s eyes, naturally acclimated to the dark, widening when he saw the creature lumbering towards them. He seized Solveig’s wrist and dragged her out of the cave.

The beast plodded forth on four feet, each tipped with long, gnarled claws. It towered twice as tall as Solveig, had a hideous hunched back and a rodent-like face. Two long, crooked tusks twisted out from the sides of its mouth. Its black hide was hairy and covered in cobwebs, with one silver stripe running down its back.

Solveig and Ocean did not stop running, even as it bluff-charged them. It stopped only a short distance out of its cave and roared a warning. Then it lumbered back into its domain, shaking the rain off its dusty coat.

The two stopped only when they ran out of breath. They ducked under a plant with large, waxy leaves that repelled water like oil.

“What was that?” Ocean panted.

Solveig shook her head, panting back, “I don’t know! It looked like a giant rat, or some kind of boar! Is it gone?”

Ocean peeked out from behind the foliage. “Yes,” he replied. “We have to be more careful. Should we keep going? Or should we return home, where we know it’s safe?”

Solveig thought for a long moment. The rain slowed down, falling in sparse drops as the sun peeked around a passing cloud.

She answered, “We should keep going. No big, mean beast has ever stopped us before.” With that, she playfully tugged at Ocean’s beard of tentacles before venturing deeper into the forest. The cecaelia couldn’t help but smile as he followed.

When the sun began to fall and the forest grew dark, neither of them were taking their chances with another cave. The island’s terrain was rough with dramatic, rocky, mountains and crags. It was also dense with trees both small and colossal, so Solveig and Ocean climbed into the branches of a great oak for the night.

Solveig kicked and rolled in her sleep. Ocean feared she would roll herself right out of the tree, so he held her tightly in his arms and coiled his tentacles around the sturdy branch he reclined upon. Frogs and crickets began singing all around them.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

The woman nestled against his torso, gripping the strap of the hide satchel around his shoulder. She closed her eyes, smiling as she replied, “Yes. I’ll just stink like fish tomorrow, that’s all.”

Ocean’s brows arched. He was stricken silent for a short moment. She was only teasing him, he realized, and his shoulders slowly relaxed. Fae always said what they meant and meant what they said. He wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to her jokes.

“I hope you’re lying,” he said.

“Of course I am,” Solveig chuckled, patting the side of his face. “Then again, maybe I’m in no position to tease you.” She squinted in the darkness, looking down at the forest floor far below.

“I would never drop you,” Ocean told her.

“No? What if I snore and kick you all night?”

“I still would never.”

“What if I said foolish, foul things to you in my sleep?”

“I made a promise to you, remember? That I would always protect you. I couldn’t break that promise if I tried.”

Solveig’s smile straightened. “That’s right,” she muttered. “So you don’t have much choice, do you? In a way, I suppose I’m holding you hostage. You only stand by my side because you _have_ to.”

“Solveig, I stand by your side because I _love_ y—” Ocean bit his loose, foolish tongue. In sheer exhaustion he’d chosen his words poorly, had let honesty slip through. Solveig raised her head to look at him.

“You _love_ me?” she queried sharply.

Ocean had angered her, offended her, made a fool of himself, he was certain. He opened his mouth to lie, to say “no”, but his fae tongue refused to say it.

He had no business loving anyone, after all. He was a defective. Unfit for the throne, unfit to breed, unfit for society. To be loved by a creature as pathetic as himself was an insult.

He closed his mouth. He would say nothing then. Solveig sat upright in his lap, still clutching the strap on his torso.

“Is it true? Do you really love me?” she asked.

The cecaelia felt his throat closing. He swallowed, felt his gills press tightly against his neck and could not open them again. His voice was hardly a croak when he replied, “I’ve said a very foolish thing. I’m sorry. Please just forget about it, and I will not speak of it again.”

“Foolish?” Solveig’s face contorted oddly. He could not read her expression. Then her lips split into a familiar toothy smile, bright as the sun even in the darkness of night. She laughed, “It’s true! You can’t deny it because it’s _true_!”

If she weren’t in his lap, Ocean would have climbed down the tree and buried himself in the dirt. He had never been so ashamed. Even the first time he was caught stealing greenbrite was less humiliating than this.

But Solveig was not angry. Rather, her smile remained, warm and genuine, as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

She held him in a tight embrace and said, “Oh, my Ocean…I’ve been waiting for the day when you’d finally admit it. No one else has ever treated me so kindly, or been so loyal or considerate to me. You promised to protect me, but you never promised to be sweet to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Ocean apologized again.

Solveig shook her head, grasping his shoulders. Her smile reflected in his yellow eyes. “Don’t apologize! You don’t know how happy you’ve made me!”

The cecaelia was baffled. “You’re not angry with me?” he asked.

“No! Why would I be?” Solveig laughed. She grasped the sides of his face, joyfully pressing her lips to his.

When she pulled away, she told him, “I love you too, Ocean. I suppose I must, because if you were anyone else, I’d have let you die on the beach last year. I don’t think you understand just how strongly I feel for you. I’ve only ever wanted to marry myself, run off with no one and die alone. Now, I couldn’t imagine living without you.”

The cecaelia shook his head slightly, struggling to understand. “But…” he began slowly, “I’m _wretched_.”

“You’re wretched only in your head,” she assured him, tapping her fingertip against his nose. “I can tell you exactly why I love you: because when I spread my wings, you never held me down. You only raised me up so that I could finally fly.”

Solveig paused for a moment, gaze falling. Her hazel eyes flicked up to meet his when she added, “I know what you were planning to do with me when you first dragged me away from Blackoak. You were a fanatic, all obsessive and strange with a hideous parasite in your head. I don’t hold it against you now, but…you didn’t see me as a person then, did you?”

Ocean could meet her gaze no longer. He closed his eyes and sighed, “No, I did not. You were another curiosity to be collected. I was terribly lonely for so long. I was desperate for company, but my own world shunned me. I suppose that’s why I began reaching my greedy hands towards your world instead. It captivated me, for it was unobtainable.”

“I was your prisoner,” Solveig continued. “You were going to keep me in that cave with you until I died. But you didn’t. Why did you change your mind?”

The cecaelia admitted, “At first, it was because I truly believed that together, we could escape Tekee and start a new life in Terria.”

He scrubbed his long, webbed fingers over his face and continued, “As time went on, as you grew sicker and our plan began falling apart…I lost my faith. At that point, I was no longer acting for my own interest. I realized that I would not make it to Redwood Island alive, but perhaps _you_ could with enough effort on my part. I had grown to adore you, and I couldn’t bear to think of you rotting away with a monster like Hemming or myself.”

The choir of crickets and frogs sang on through the silence. Then, Solveig embraced Ocean again. She mumbled against his neck, “If you were anyone else, I’d call you a liar.”

*

Two days later, the clouds parted and the sun’s golden rays beamed down on the eastern edge of Redwood Island. It was as if the gods themselves were presenting this scenic paradise to Solveig and Ocean, beckoning them to stay forever.

So, they did.

Together they explored the entire island, becoming familiar with all its resources and dangers. They learned to share this land with the native boar-rat beast.

It slept through the cold months and hunted only at night. It was afraid of fire, for the light blinded it as it blinded the cecaelia. As far as they could tell, it was the last of its kind, and a rather old specimen at that.

Solveig wondered if the beast ever got lonely. But when she tried to approach it with offerings of meat, it only snarled and chased her out of its territory. In time, she and Ocean reached a silent understanding with the creature. As long as they did not provoke it, it crossed their path peacefully.

“Please stay away from that beast,” Ocean begged Solveig. “You’re going to get killed!”

But of course, there was no telling Solveig what to do. She did as she pleased, and it pleased her to observe the strange creature.

She watched as it used its massive claws, not to tear prey apart as she expected, but to dig up fat tubers and mushrooms. It unearthed potatoes the size of a human head and swallowed them whole.

It became clear that the beast had no interest in eating her or Ocean. It simply migrated between caves every season in search of new foraging grounds. When it happened to be in the area, Solveig left an offering of potatoes.

“I wish you wouldn’t feed it,” Ocean told her. “It isn’t your pet, nor your child.”

Solveig argued, “But Kaiva was here before us. He’s so grand, he must be king of the island. If we’re going to live on his land, we should give something back.”

“Kaiva? You’ve given it a name?”

“Sure, why not?”

Ocean said no more, for he knew Solveig well.

That night, though it pained him, he left a potato at the edge of the forest clearing. Solveig watched him from the window of their simple hut of wattle and daub. When he returned, she greeted him with a smile and a kiss, warming his heart.

*

Ten years passed since Ocean and Solveig stepped upon Redwood Island’s shore. A decade was but a blink of Ocean’s ancient eye, but for Solveig, the time passed much slower.

Solveig used this time to craft bow after bow until she finally got the hang of it. Now she had a fearsome, accurate weapon to fire bone-tipped arrows.

Today, she used it to hunt the bothersome coyotes that stole the meat she left out to dry. The pests would soon join the venison on the rack, she thought.

But that wasn’t the case, for the earth gave way under Solveig’s feet. She tumbled down a steep embankment in the forest, crashing down into the rocky pond below. She screamed for help, hoping she would draw Ocean before she drew a pack of coyotes.

She was not far from home. Ocean arrived breathless, rushing to carry her back to their hut. Her leg was twisted horribly—the same leg she’d mangled over a decade ago when she leaped into the sea.

This time, the clan king was not there to heal her with his magic. It was up to Ocean and sheer luck to nurse her back to health.

Solveig lie on their bedroll of furs, expression contorted in pain. “If only I were a cecaelia, I could just cut off my leg and grow a new one,” she groaned.

Ocean carefully wrapped the swollen limb with strips of leather as he told her, “If only I were a halfway decent mage, I could fix your leg in an instant. But you are a human and I am a fool, so we’ll just have to do our best with what we have.”

He finished wrapping her leg and planted a kiss on her forehead. She smiled back at him through the pain.

*

Five more years passed by.

Solveig could hear the whisper of the waterfall from home. Just a short walk down the path was the great pool it poured into, leading to a river that twisted around the whole island. In the warm months, the waterfall became thinner as the lake above dried up.

Ocean spent much of his time in the waterfall’s pool. Here he would hydrate his skin and dive for fish and frogs. Solveig couldn’t join him in the cold months, but summer had come around again, and she eagerly stripped off her clothes before wading into the water.

It was refreshing on her skin, washing away the sweat of her labor. She looked forward to swimming with Ocean every evening, when the day’s work was done and they hadn’t a care until tomorrow. Solveig swam out to the center of the pool, where her feet were free of the slimy, gritty sand.

The cecaelia’s eyes surfaced before her. She reached for him, but he quickly sank down again and disappeared in the blue murk. Solveig turned all around, searching for ripples in the water, but it seemed he dived too deep. She never saw him coming when he surfaced from behind and splashed the back of her head.

By the time she turned around, he had disappeared once more. Solveig gasped at the cold water. Her open mouth curved into a smile as she shouted, “Ocean!”

The cecaelia could hear her muffled voice beneath the surface, saw her silhouette against the sunlight, legs kicking to keep her afloat. One was still slightly crooked at the knee where she’d twisted it years ago.

He waited until she turned her head, then surfaced behind her. She heard him coming and quickly turned around to face him. But just before she could grab him, he spit a stream of water in her face before diving out of her grasp. Solveig sputtered, raking her wet locks from her eyes.

“You awful devil! I’ll gut you like the fish you are!” she laughed, and then with great, round stokes she propelled herself towards the boulders below the waterfall. She turned her back to the rocky face. Ocean couldn’t sneak up from behind now.

The fall’s mist cascaded over her like gentle rain. She shielded her brow with one hand, clutching the rocks with the other as she searched for the cecaelia’s shadow. It was hard to see in the ripples of the fall, splitting and tricking down over the great boulders behind.

Perhaps she didn’t see him, but she didn’t have to, for she felt his rubbery skin graze against her shins. She had half a mind to kick him, but instead let out a yelp as his tentacles suddenly coiled around her legs.

She could tell what they were by feel alone, knew the unique texture of their little suckers. Once they puckered against her flesh, it was impossible to escape until he decided to let go.

Ocean tugged her down ever so slightly, threatening to pull her beneath the surface. Solveig shrieked in equal parts surprise and delight. She flailed her arms, unable to swim with her legs in his grasp. An outsider might have rushed to her rescue, believing she was under attack.

But Solveig had no fear. She trusted that Ocean would never harm her, whether he was bound by fae promises or not. She felt the gentle pressure of pointed teeth grazing over her ankle. The teeth travelled upwards, nipping at her calf and thigh, each bite soothed with the sweep of a long, strange tongue.

Webbed fingers groped at her backside, mindful of their claws as they held her head above water. Solveig’s grasp on the wet stone slipped. She struggled to keep hold again, giggling and squirming in Ocean’s hold. She could see him now, at least the shadow of his head between her thighs.

One hand on the stone, she caressed his head with the other. Something slipped inside her—tongue or tentacle, she could hardly tell the difference. Either way, she had no fear of sons or daughters. Sex was unknown to cecaelia. What Ocean knew now was taught to him by Solveig, for his kind had no concept of such a thing.

Cecaelia, he told her, procreated without contact. Females laid eggs every half-century regardless, and a male could fertilize the clutch with spermatophores in one of his tentacles if he chose. It all seemed so impersonal to Solveig. Where was the romance in such a clinical exchange?

So she taught him the ways of human passion, and to make her so happy, to see her react with such drama, made the cecaelia’s hearts swell with love and pride. He did not think he could love her more.

But she also taught him the ways of human mischief, and so just as she began writhing her back against the stone, whimpering for more, he suddenly jerked her down into the water.

Solveig’s shriek was cut short, leaving her in a steam of bubbles. She opened her eyes, squinting in the murk.

She saw her cecaelian lover hanging upside-down, wearing a cheeky smile as he waggled his tongue at her. Then he bolted downwards, disappearing in the depths. Solveig thrashed around with all four of her limbs—not trying to surface, but trying to pummel him in revenge.

He soon returned, approaching her from behind. He seized her waist and quickly pulled her above the water with him, wrapping her in a tight embrace. He planted fervent kisses all over her face and head, showing that he’d meant no harm, but still she was not laughing.

Solveig remained silent and rigid, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. She turned her head away and refused to meet his gaze. Ocean’s brow sagged, heavy with concern.

“Solveig, are you alright?” he asked cautiously. He tried forcing his face in her view, but yet again she turned away.

“Solveig?” he queried again. This time, Solveig turned and spewed a mouthful of water between his brows. He drew back from her, stunned. The woman burst into wild laughter as she slapped her hand against the surface, splashing him over and over with great waves.

She shrieked when Ocean ducked below the surface and tackled her at the waist, pushing her towards the shore. In seconds she was lying in the muck with the lilies and weeds.

Frogs fled in her wake. Ocean’s hands squelched in the mud on either side of her as he dragged himself onto shore. He loomed over her like a storm cloud, and he was just as wet.

His aqua lips curled into a smile. “Are you really going to gut me like a fish? Or was that a lie?” he asked.

Solveig thought for a moment, tapping her finger against her chin. Then he felt her legs wrap around his waist, pulling him closer. She said, “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t and we’ll find out.”

*

Another decade passed, and so too did the largest, oldest beast on Redwood Island.

Solveig grew concerned as her potato offerings rotted away at the edge of the property. They were slowly being consumed by ants rather than King Kaiva, who had never missed an offering before.

This cold, misty afternoon, Solveig picked up her walking staff, pulled on her fur cloak and set out to the beast’s autumn cave. Ocean followed, unaffected by the brisk temperature. Only when the dew turned to frost did he warm himself with his magic.

They approached the cave together with caution, holding another great offering of potatoes in a basket. Ocean willed magic to his hands and nurtured an orb of light between them. He held it like a torch, lighting the mouth of the cavern.

“Oh…” Solveig muttered behind her leather mitten. She swatted at one of the many flies buzzing about, her heart sinking at the sight and stench in front of her.

King Kaiva was dead. By the state of his sunken, bloodstained body, he had likely passed weeks ago. The coyotes had already picked his remains clean, all but his shaggy black and silver coat, crawling with flies and grubs.

Solveig set the basket down on the stony floor. She stood in silence, burying her face in her mittens.

Ocean pulled her into an embrace. He said softly, “He was very old, Solveig.”

The woman wiped a tear from her cheek. “I know,” she sniffled. “But I’ll miss him. He was such a funny creature, and surely the last of his kind. He was special.”

Stepping closer to the corpse, Solveig paid the king a steep bow of respect. She said a silent prayer to see his soul to the celestials, and then she and Ocean tearfully returned home. The basket was left in the cave as one final offering.

*

Time marched on and on. It would not stop, nor even slow, no matter how much Ocean pleaded with the universe. Time was unfeeling and unmerciful. Ready or not, it brought the cold season around once again.

Ocean had been honing his magic. Without greenbrite plaguing his body and mind, he was capable of so much more. Each year his spells became grander. He casted illusions made from light: neon geometry shaped roughly into people, places, and things.

In time those shapes became more intricate. He spent many hours with Solveig as she slept, trying to recreate her peaceful face with light. But just when he mastered her likeness, her likeness changed again.

Solveig’s once smooth skin became burdened by gravity. Moles and warts joined her freckles, her delicate hands now gnarled like a Blackoak trunk. Her leg remained twisted, more painful and burdensome by the year. She hobbled along with her staff, slower and slower…

Until one day, she sat down and never stood up.

Seventy-nine tally marks were chiseled into the face of the waterfall mountain. Each one represented the coming of the rainy season, the celebration of a new year, and the survival of winter.

Ocean looked up at the falls, its spray frozen in great, ominous spikes. What wasn’t frozen trickled down the rocky face.

Ocean filled his empty gourd with water and carried it back home. He threw one last glance at the tally marks. He was eager to mark the eightieth in the coming weeks. In the meantime he quickly returned to his hut, passing through the glimmering dome of light surrounding it.

The dome was a magical force field of his own design. Its surface was warm and bright, simulating sunlight even on such a dreary, cloudy day. It melted all the snow within a certain radius. Most importantly, it kept Solveig warm.

Her life on Redwood Island had made her plump and healthy. All but the last two years, when she’d grown too weak to stand. She remained sitting on the floor, then eventually lying in bed at home. She had not even the strength to lift her head anymore.

Her cloudy, hazel eyes drifted towards Ocean as he stepped inside. His force field melted the snowflakes on his head and shoulders, leaving them wet.

Solveig smiled and creaked, “Oh, a devil. Have you come from the sea to visit?”

Ocean sat down beside her, crossing his legs and curling his tentacles in a spiral. He gently brushed her hair from her face, withered as the plants, her hair white as the snow.

“It’s me, Solveig,” he told her. He had to speak louder, for her ears had been failing her. He tipped the gourd to her lips, but she placed her hand upon it and furrowed her brows at him.

“It’s you? I don’t know who _you_ are,” she said.

Ocean’s blood suddenly ran cold. He stomachs rolled like the sea. He was stricken silent for a long moment, until Solveig couldn’t bear to tease him any longer. Her lips spread into a big smile, exposing what few teeth she had left.

“Seven decades on and you still fall for my tricks,” she chuckled.

Ocean’s shoulders relaxed. He dragged a palm down his weary face and replied, “_Eight_ decades.”

“Eight now?” The woman raised her brows. She was quiet for a moment, staring hard into oblivion.

Then she said, “How time has flown like the wind with you, dear Ocean.”

The cecaelia offered a smile. It did not come naturally, straining his face. He raised the gourd again and she accepted a drink.

Her body rattled with coughs, sputtering some water onto her chin. Ocean wiped it away with his thumb, seizing the opportunity to caress her face.

Her smile remained as she squinted up at him, said, “If only I were a cecaelia, I would be as healthy and beautiful as you. You have poor judgment, falling in love with a human.”

Ocean took her hand in his. “I love you today as I’ve loved you eight decades ago, and I will love you just as much tomorrow,” he said. “I will love you forever.”

Solveig’s smile faded. She closed her eyes, voice creaking like a tree in the wind. “I will not _be_ forever, my sweet Ocean. Soon I’ll join my ancestors in the stars. When I do, your promise…” She trailed off as a cough rattled her body.

“My promise will be broken,” Ocean finished quietly, distantly.

“Yes.” Solveig’s smile returned again, strained as she rasped, “The memory of your mother and father nearly destroyed you. Please, don’t let mine do the same.”

Ocean shook his head. “I won’t let it,” he told her.

Her gaze hardened towards his own, her gnarled fingers closing tighter on his hand. “Promise my memory, so that you will keep it forever.”

The cecaelia leaned forward, planting a kiss on her lips. “I promise to the memory of my dear Solveig,” he began, “that I will not mourn her forever, and that I will never let grief be my undoing.”

“And promise me this,” added Solveig, “that you will always protect what you love, just as you once protected me.”

A strange look crossed the cecaelia’s face. “Why so?”

After a ragged cough, Solveig told him, “Because I’ve known you for eighty years of my life. You don’t care for yourself enough to roll like the ocean as you should. Without purpose, you will sit stagnant like the pond, growing algae on your hide.”

Ocean’s expression fell, defeated. She always did know him better than he knew himself.

“You’re right. I would,” he admitted sullenly.

“So promise my memory that you won’t. Otherwise I will never be at peace.”

The cecaelia took in a deep breath. He let it out slow, yellow eyes meeting her hazel. “I make this final promise to the memory of my beloved Solveig, that I will always protect what I love just as I protected her in life.”

*

Ocean watched the last of the snow melt away. The rainy season was upon him once again.

He brought an arrowhead to the side of the falls, raising it to scratch another tally mark into the stone. His hand stopped, hovering there for some time. He’d seen the end of winter, but he couldn’t bring himself to celebrate. Not all alone.

The arrowhead fell to the ground. Ocean returned to his hut, so quiet and lifeless inside. Solveig had passed weeks ago. Though he knew she would, and he’d been preparing himself for decades, her death still hit him like a monsoon, washing away everything that ever mattered in his life.

But he’d made a promise to her memory, and her memory certainly lingered within him. He was sure it always would until his dying breath. He promised her that he would not mourn her forever, and that he would protect what he loved. He had finally shed his last tear for her.

Now it was time to fulfill the rest of his promise.

Ocean packed a sharkskin satchel full of supplies. He slung the strap diagonally over his shoulder and fastened the belt around his waist. Where he was going, it needed to be secure.

But before he left for his long and treacherous journey, Ocean visited one last place on the island. He made the arduous climb up the rocky falls, up the narrow path that winded like seaweed on the shore.

At the very top was a stony peak where only low-lying flowers could grow. The peak towered above even the tallest of the mighty redwoods, and its wind blew cold like winter.

This was the peak they saw on the horizon long ago, as if beckoning them to the island. Solveig had made this climb just once with Ocean in her youth, before she’d injured her leg.

This place enchanted her, for she could see the entire island from its heights. She’d made some offhand comment that this was where she wanted her body to remain, so it could watch over their paradise for all eternity.

Ocean never forgot it. And when Solveig’s body finally released her spirit, he carried her vessel all the way back up the falls and buried it right where they rested in the past. Today, he stood before her grave to say one final goodbye.

“Goodbye to the flesh and blood you once called your own,

Goodbye to the face I knew for so long,

Goodbye, my Solveig, for no one is forever,

Goodbye, my love, for it’s time to move on.”

Ocean plucked a poppy, orange and vibrant as the sun, and placed it over the grave. It was marked by a stack of boulders piled high, standing strong against the frigid wind.

As he promised, it was time to move on.

The cecaelia looked over the falls’ edge, down into the clear, rippling lake below. He stepped many paces back. Then, with a running start, he leaped over the lofty edge.

Ocean knew the lake like the back of his hand. He missed the hazardous boulders and plunged straight into its deepest crater, following the flow towards the mouth of the river.

The river, he knew, would eventually lead him to the sea. But the sea was not what he loved. What he loved was Terria, and the sea still remained the biggest obstacle between himself and happiness.

If the legends were true, then the islands were only a small part of Terria. They were said to be but freckles on the face of Gaia. Both the Tekeetians’ royalty and the Blackoak tribe’s elders spoke of faraway lands. Ocean was determined to find them, no matter the danger.

Solveig told him of the towering flames that consumed Blackoak Island. Her words burned another scar in his brain that he would remember always. She had been the last of her people, and her death marked the very end of the Blackoak Tribe. Like King Kaiva, there were no others like her.

He knew exactly who was responsible. He knew well the unceasing wrath of the Tekeetian clan king, who obsessed over vengeance just as strongly as Ocean obsessed over love. Ocean loved Terria as he always did and always would. But if he failed to protect it, then Terria would be no more.

The cecaelia set out to unknown waters to fulfill his last promise. He wondered if Solveig watched over him now, wondered if her spirit would somehow guide him as her ancestors guided them to Redwood Island.

He didn’t wonder for long. A pod of squealing, smiling dolphins soon joined him on his journey.

**END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you noticed any mistakes, please let me know. All feedback is appreciated. :)


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